Please Help if You Can

Paul Williams, a legend of rock criticism -- he founded Crawdaddy magazine in 1966 at the age of seventeen and championed Philip K. Dick when he needed it badly -- has fallen on hard times. He suffered a debilitating head injury in the Nineties, in a cycling accident. This injury led him into a state of early-onset dementia, and he now requires full-time care -- an expense his family can ill afford. The Friends of Paul Williams have set up a web site is really worth looking at, featuring some rather amazing photos from a life lived to the fullest.

I hope you go over there and hit the Donate button. I know it's about the worst possible time to ask for this kind of thing, but having watched a father-in-law succumb to that horrifying disease, I know how difficult it is not only for the victim, but particularly for the caregivers as well. Anything you can do to help out would be appreciated.

Here's an article about him at BoingBoing. Read the comments, too: it'll give you some idea of Williams' impact in the world of both rock 'n' roll and science fiction.

A Crowd of People Stood and Stared

Sometimes life just gets weirder than you can handle.

One thing you discover when you start a blog is that what you type goes straight from your keyboard to Google's ears -- frequently overnight. I have to keep this post as circumspect as I possibly can, naming no names, because I don't want this to get anywhere near Google's omniscience.

This morning, my sister called to tell me that this Sunday past, a somewhat distant relative of mine murdered a rather closer relative. An elderly woman, she was killed in her home where she thought she was safe. Again staying as circumspect as I can, I haven't seen the victim in well over twenty years, and I wasn't even aware of the murderer's existence, despite his relation to me. He is now in police custody, and is unlikely to see the outside of a prison or insane asylum for the rest of his life.

It's one thing for your sister to call you and tell you of a family tragedy. That was hard enough. I'm still rather numb from the shock of the news. I've had an afternoon of tearful and emotional phone calls, trying to piece together the details of the events that led to this horrible thing. But goddamned Google is another -- all I had to do was enter the victim's name and the word "murder" and the thing was described to me in horrific detail. Much, much, much more, honestly, than I wanted to know. I was looking for names and circumstances and legal outcomes; Google gave me graphic descriptions of the murder scene. I was at work, and in my shocked state I had to ask permission to leave and go home. I was not going to be a useful human being after that.

We're such vulnerable things. This afternoon, running a necessary errand in my hyper-attenuated state, I came upon a horrible car crash on Route 7; one car had gone head-on into the side of another. The head-on car was utterly crushed; its front hood now measured no more than a couple of feet. The engine had been slammed into the passenger cavity. Nobody was hurt, as far as I could tell. Approaching sirens howled from the distance. Victims stood, babbling distractedly into cell phones -- reassuring loved ones, I suppose, or informing insurance adjusters of their new premium payments.

A crowd of people stood and stared.

I have no idea how to end this thing.

Go find somebody you love, hug them, and hold them tight. Tell 'em, for tonight, anyway, that Neddie sent you.

Everything ends.

Signs of the Times

Driving Betty to work this morning, we passed this sign on the Clara Barton Parkway:


"Leave Nothing of Value"....

Well! I know the economy's in the crapper, but this is laying on a bit thick. Easy enough to comply with, at any rate -- as attested by a glance at the whistling emptiness that is my 401(k) these days.

But it's a hair nihilistic, don't you think? Is the Parks Department, or the Highway Commission, or whoever erected this sad exhortation, prepared to deal with the sort of society they're advocating here? One in which we say to our children and grandchildren, "I'm sorry, my dears, there's nothing in my will for you; I've spent my entire fortune on fripperies and expensive travel with cocaine and hookers -- because the Department of the Interior said I should! They made a sign!"

And they're so inarticulate! What is their definition of "value"? There are so many intangible things that I would have to give up in order to obey the sign: the love of my family and friends, my fondness for music and laughter and love, for sun-dappled lawns, for frosty windows on a clear, cold morning, for Long Woks on the beach (she's such a dear), for composing loony, wall-eyed blog-posts....

My blog! I value my blog! Must that be discarded as well? Truly?

Well, then. So long. It's been good to know you.

Date Night

Last night, Wonder Woman and I had our first "date" in eons. Betty was invited to a party on a boat that left from the Old-Town Alexandria docks at 6 in the evening, to return at 9. Freddie was at a heavy-metal Battle of the Local Suck-Ass Bands at Jaxx in Springfield, under the tutelage of a Different Mom, leaving WW and I with three glorious hours of alone-time to kill on our own little lonesomes.

Over dinner at the Union Street Public House on, of all things, Union Street in Old Town, we got giggly. We decided to pretend that we were on a Washington Post Date Lab date, meeting each other for the very first time on a pre-arranged blind date, which we would rate later, independently, for the Post's readership:

"She said she was a painting conservator at the Smithsonian; her latest project was a sixteenth-century Dutch landscape in the school of Breughel the Elder. I thought that was interesting, but then she ordered the lobster-and-crab-cakes -- the most costly thing on the entire menu. This girl could get expensive! At this point in the budding relationship, I'd rate the date a two out of five. She's got a great ass."

"He said he was a pimp. This got my attention; those guys make a lot of money! Then, he ordered a single-malt whiskey while we were looking at the menu, a Laphroig, and my heart melted just a little bit more. But when his speech began to slur halfway through his second Half-Moon Belgian-Style wheat beer and he started in telling sob stories about his first marriage, I decided this wasn't the guy for me. After dinner, when we went for a stroll through Old Town's cobblestone streets, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and that was all it took. Negative one out of five. Never again. He pressed his business card on me, but I threw it into the Potomac as I headed for the Blue Line."

As we wandered up King Street with still another hour and a half to kill, we noticed a small crowd of people surrounding a figure in Colonial garb. Ghost Tour, FTW! Quick as a wink, we joined the crowd, offering up our coppers for an hour's entertainment in the chilly rain. As it turns out, everyone who has ever died in Old Town Alexandria under even slightly tragic circumstances now wanders the streets, moaning and clanking chains. It occurred to us that, given the proper sad ending, we could haunt Old Town as a pair of mutually reinforcing poltergeists, knocking drinks off trendy tables and making flatware spin in the air three inches off a bar's surface. Considering this a marvelous prospect, we ran to throw ourselves into the river, the best to drown ourselves and cement the eternal love that would be lied about by future bonnet-bedecked out-of-work actors.

Just as we were preparing to leap off the levee into the cold unfeeling waters below, holding hands and declaring undying love, we noticed that Betty's boat was docking. Ah, well. I suppose the girl needs parents for a few more years.

No matter how silly.

The Ides

It has come to our attention that a historic travesty of epic proportions is about to be corrected -- and not a minute too soon.

A Dark-Ages manuscript-copying error in an Irish monastery in approximately 800 AD led to the erroneous spelling of the dismal month in which we find ourselves. It is not March. We inhabit the month of Narch.

An understandable flub, I'll admit. Handwriting in that unenviable era was notoriously sloppy, and many of the world's current travails stem from simple mistranslations and poorly proofread Biblical verses. The injunction in Leviticus against the eating of shellfish was originally a prohibition against the carnal knowledge of barnyard animals. The monk responsible for this error had an irrational hatred of fried clams (and who doesn't, eh?), and read far too much into the original Hebraic. (This should not be taken as an exhortation to run out and boink the nearest goat. That is, and always will be, wrong. Verbal permission must always be obtained beforehand, and goats capable of issuing such consent are mighty thin on the ground. "Na-a-a-a" means "na-a-a-a.")

Now we find ourselves in the difficult position of attempting to convince the world to change a million million calendars -- rather like standing athwart history and yelling "It's Narch!" But I'm convinced we few, we happy few, can get the job done.

The first task is to socialize the idea. The upcoming NCAA basketball tournament must be referred to, wherever possible, as "Narch Nadness." The actor who, in a community production of "Julius Caesar," enjoins Caesar to "beware the Ides of Narch," wins plaudits from our righteous movement. One must be careful, though. Repetition of "Narching to Pretoria" and "steal a narch" only muddies the waters and sows confusion.

In other news, did that Jon Stewart cat administer a can of whoop-ass on Jim Cramer or what? Amiright? Woooo!

If a Miller Were My Trade/At a Mill-wheel Grinding

There are days you don't want to trade for anything. Today was such a day.

Suppose, on a lovely, unseasonably warm early-spring day, you were wandering through woods such as these, on Short Hill Mountain in far Northern Virginia...

...and you came across this object poking out through the leaf-mulch:

What would you think? Perhaps that you'd stumbled across a Flintstones-era car-factory, interrupted in mid-manufacture of a prehistoric wheelbarrow? Or perhaps a demented Indian coin-minting facility?

In fact, what you've found is a nineteenth-century millstone, its creation begun but never ended, left for the ages in the middle of this primeval forest. Its creator, his name probably forever lost, abandoned his craftwork in this forest half-finished, halfway up a mountain in the middle of what is functionally nowhere. No doubt he had been commissioned by a local miller to carve a millstone, and for whatever reason, the work was left undone.

The object is exactly three feet across; I measured it with my forearm, an excellent gauge to measure 18 inches twice. I have no knowledge of Standards and Practices among the millers of the east coast of the United States in the nineteenth century, but that precise three-foot diameter is suggestive.

He began by picking a likely rock -- my mineralogical powers are greatly reduced since I took that stone to the head on the highway on my motorbike, but granite schist seems to be the right formula -- roughing out a three-foot circle, flattening the face of the stone, then carving the thing into a rough circle, slightly larger than the three-foot spec. Then, much more carefully, he began to cut his true line.

Here we see where the rough line ends and the true line begins:


But he stopped working on it, didn't he. Why? Did the carver, or somebody with interest in the matter such as the miller who commisioned the stone, die? Was skulduggery somehow in play?

We examined the stone carefully. It occurred to us that there must be chips from the stone nearby, if this was the true site where the stone was carved -- not necessarily a reliable assumption, as we were on the side of a mountain. Gravity and earth-heaving could have moved our millstone a good long way from its original site in a hundred-plus years. We found no obvious chips, however. It's possible that they were buried under many inches of accumulated leaf-mulch.

Then one of us noticed this, an imperfection in the roundness of the stone:

Could it be that, after what must have been days and days of work, his chisel slipped? Or an inherent imperfection in the stone, a crack, dropped a few fractions of an inch off the carefully carved stone? What kind of despairing profanities painted these trees blue at that point?

I've said we were in a primeval forest. That's not quite true. At some point in the nineteenth century, this was inhabited land. An abandoned road above us on the mountain is strewn with trash from the 1950s. Decaying stone walls, delineating long-dead property lines, limn the landscape:





The stone foundation of what might have been a carriage-house lies a few dozen yards downhill from the millstone:


Daffodils do not grow naturally in North America; whenever you find daffodils on the woods on Short Hill, you know you are near what someone once regarded with pride as a precious garden. They're also astonishingly long-lived. Here, some few short yards from the millstone, we find this:

We are on property that also encompasses a working dairy-farm. Cows die from natural causes as well as slaughter. The ones that die on their own are inedible (who knows what kind of nasty virus carried them off?), and have to be disposed of somehow. Here we see how that happens; they are dragged into the woods uphill to feed the carrion birds and coyotes:


We were invited to inspect the grounds of the decaying, abandoned farm that once flourished on this land. Its 200-plus acres were bought by a foreign investor in the mid-1990s, and since then has been simply a place where cows live. The investor had intended to put up some 40-plus homes on the acreage, but... Well. We've seen how well that housing market has been going.


But what's bad for housing vultures is good for historians concerned with preserving the local folkways before they're paved over. The farm began with the early-nineteenth-century stone structure to the left of this photo. The bovine individual to the extreme right of the picture, I only discovered after taking it, is an ungelded bull. I spoke softly and invoked Brotherhood to get past him.


The interior of the slate-roofed bank-barn is stunning; imagine this as a living-space:




Placing outbuildings above ground prohibits rot. This looks mighty precarious, but this building has stood in this spot for over a hundred years:


Here is the death-knell for this beautiful building. When that crooked supporting beam goes, this stunning space will be no more. It will collapse. And we'll have lost one more reminder of where we come from.

Don't You Know that You Can Count Me Out

This is fairly exciting...

In late May and early June of 1968, the Beatles recorded the White Album version (that is, the slow, more acoustic version, not the crackling, electric single) of "Revolution 1." On May 30, they did eighteen basic takes, with the last being considered best. Unlike the other surviving takes, Take 18 was just over ten minutes long -- the others being about five minutes -- and went on rather obsessively repeating the "Bowm, shoo-be-doo-wah"s. On May 31, they took Take 18, overdubbed vocals and bass, and made a reduction mix, now called Take 19.

On Tuesday, June 4, Take 19 received a lot of overdubs, some rather mundane sweetening, and some extremely strange. The latter part of the song, which would be faded out of the final track, featured obstreperous tone-pedal guitar squeals, spooky Yoko Ono utterances ("you become naked") dropped-in piano tinkles, screaming, and an obsessively repeated "mama, dada" chorus. Clearly, Lennon had already begun to conceive of the piece as a portrait of revolution in sound -- no doubt highly influenced by the extreme world events that were happening at exactly the same time: That March had seen the My Lai Massacre, April the assassination of Martin Luther King, subsequent riots and the student takeover of Columbia University, and May the événements in Paris that nearly toppled the French government. The day after the making of Take 20, as the newly dubbed version was known, Robert Kennedy was murdered.

(Quite a year, that 1968.)

Knowing full well that a ten-minute tune that dissolves into musique concrète couldn't possibly serve as the Beatles' next single (although Lennon argued mightily in favor of it), the compromise was that the song faded at about five minutes, and Lennon lopped off the "weird" second half of the take, flounced into another studio, wiped anything musical that remained, and used it as the starting point for "Revolution 9."

Until now, Take 20 has been a chimera to the Beatle-obsessed world. According to Mark Lewisohn, the band's most authoritative chronicler, a single taped copy was made of it and taken away by Lennon.

But now it has resurfaced, and you can hear it here.

(N.B.: Another site that hosted it was hit by a cease-and-desist and had to take it down. So I don't know how long it will survive at the linked site. I was able to snag a copy using Audio Hijack, so if it does disappear again, hit me at my email address and we'll see what we can make happen.)

I've A/B'd the album version and this new Take 20, and I do believe it to be genuine. A few edits were made on the final version, that nasty tone-pedal guitar wiped and replaced with languid horns, but the bones of the piece are there. Likewise, quite a bit of the second half made it into Revolution 9.

One of the more fascinating documents I've come across in a while.

(Many thanks to John and Simon for hipping me to this.)

Blackberry? Opinions?

This no-email-at work thing is really beginning to rankle. I desperately need some kind of solution, or I'll go completely bugfuck from boredom and the ennui of not being able to blog or talk to anybody.

We have a Verizon cellphone/landline deal. My current phone is a cheapie LG flip-phone, but I'm thinking Blackberry. I'd love an iPhone for its slickness and its total integration with OS X, but we're roped into that Verizon account pretty tightly, and AT&T coverage (I'm told) kinda sucks.

So I'm thinking Blackberry Storm, the new one with touch-screen capabilities. Verizons offering it for $119 with a 2-year contract extension, which seems mighty sweet to me. Don't care about audio or camera capabilities, but I absolutely need the ability to write email and IMs, and surf the Web without restrictions. I've read extremely mixed reviews of this device, from raves to outright warnings not to buy; I suspect that a lot of the glitches people experienced had to do with early adoption, and that later firmware updates will have repaired some of the problems.

I'm also willing to lose touch-screen features in favor of reliability. I like what I read about the Blackberry Curve, but I've read so many reviews now that my eyes are beginning to glaze over.

Any of you folks have any opinions? Please help a glaze-eyed and entertainment-starved raconteur out...

Radio Silence

Thanks to those who've nudged me, wondering why the hell I haven't posted in over a week.

Truth to tell, in order to keep the wolves away I've taken a six-month contract job at a place that is so paranoid about security, they allow their workers no Internet access whatsoever. Not just firewalls and blocked YouTube vids: none whatsoever. The Twin Towers could fall again, I'd never know about it until I got home. They're not evil; they make no guns or bombs or rockets, and they actually help people and make their lives better. But they are extremely concerned with security. So my blogging time is limited to evenings and weekends, and Christ knows what I'm going to do with my lunch-hours and slow moments. Catch up on my reading or something, I guess. There are quite a few public WiFi spots within easy reach; maybe I'll take to having my lunch there.

Meantime, the old resume goes back out. This cannot go on.

He Cares! He Really Cares!

I cross-posted the recent Lennon piece over at NewCritics, and the author of the book, Jonathan Gould, dropped a comment.

I'll never wash this blog again.

Learn Something New Every Day

I had never heard this anecdote before. It's from Jonathan Gould's luminescent book on the Beatles, Can't Buy Me Love:

"And Your Bird Can Sing" sounds like the second act of "She Said, She Said" -- another song about personal pretention, sung by John to the accompaniment of George's crazed, cacophonous guitar. [N.B., it should be both John and George's crazed, cacophonous guitars, but perfection eludes even this splendid book.] "Tell me that you've got everything you want, and your bird can sing, but you don't get me," John taunts his anonymous adversary in the opening verse. Listeners tended to assume that the "bird" in question was British slang for "girl," and the song works well on that assumption. But Lennon was stalking bigger game in "And Your Bird Can Sing." The song was inspired by a profile of Frank Sinatra by Gay Talese that appeared in the April 1966 issue of Esquire. "Bird," Talese wrote, " is a favorite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, 'How's your bird?'; and when he nearly drowned in Hawaii, he later explained, 'Just got a little water on my bird'; and under a large photograph of him holding a whiskey bottle that hangs in the home of an actor friend named Dick Bakalyan, the inscription reads, 'Drink, Dickie! It's good for your bird.'" What brought the article to Lennon's attention in the first place was not its revelations about Sinatra's private vocabulary, but rather his attitude toward an upcoming network television special with which he hoped to reassert himself as a force in contemporary pop:

Sinatra had been very excited about this show; he saw here an opportunity to appeal not only to those nostalgic, but also to communicate his talent to some rock-and-rollers -- in a sense, he was battling the Beatles. The press releases being prepared by Mahoney's office stressed this, read: "If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons...."

After the crack about mops and melons, John Lennon could take some satisfaction in reading about "an inconspicuous little gray-haired lady" on Sinatra's staff whose sole responsibility was to care for the singer's collection of sixty "remarkably convincing" toupees. But Talese's fawning description of Sinatra's charisma ("the embodiment of the fully emancipated male, perhaps the only one in America , the man who can have anything he wants") and Sinatra's wealth ("his film company, his record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five") was more than enough to inflame John's sense of professional jealousy. Insult had been added to injury around the time the article appeared with the announcement of the Grammy Awards for 1965. In the year of Highway 61 and Rubber Soul, the American record industry turned its back on the youthful trends in pop by honoring Sinatra in the categories of best male vocalist and best album for a world-weary collection called September of My Years. "Tell me that you've heard every sound there is," crooned the world's greatest kid singer in his enigmatic reply, "and your bird can swing. But you can't hear me. You can't hear me."

So what we've learned here, class, is that "And Your Bird Can Sing" is about Frank Sinatra's dick.

I'm sure your lives are greatly enriched by this knowledge.

One of the more charming tracks on the Anthology is an outtake of the Fabs trying to track the vocal on this song, and absolutely pissing themselves laughing. I'd assumed it was the effect of an herbal jazz cigarette; now I believe we have another data-point in explaining the howling laughter.

(Damned shame that books about pop music aren't carefully footnoted; I'd love to know precisely where this information came from. Gould's bibliography is 12 very closely set pages, and I don't have a lifetime to devote to tracking it down.)

Slightly later update: With this information in mind, the bridge takes on whole universes of new meaning:

When your prized possessions
Start to weigh you down
Look in my direction
I'll be round
I'll be round

Without this knowledge, it's an offer for help, a friendly "you've got a shoulder to cry on." But with it, ooof! Burn!

Slightly later, later update: How much you wanna bet that "possessions/direction" rhyme started with "erection"? Knowing John....

Commenter Jim from the "WTF?" post -- I haven't forgotten about you. I'm still thinking.

Happy Blogroll Amnesty Day!

If the term leaves you nonplussed, read about it here.

• Blue Wren takes on Andrew Sullivan's goober religiosity.
• Fred Wickham examines the Super Bowl commercials.
• Jeremy Cherfas makes him some cheese.
• James Finn Garner yawps at Rod Blagojevich.
• Will Divide, my Chumps of Choice partner in crime, rereads Huckleberry Finn. Didn't know he was doing this; I'm in!

I'm supposedly limited to five, but WTF... How'm I supposed to do that?

• Christopher Walsh has the same reaction I did to Obama's mention of "unbelievers" in his Inaugural speech.
• Giggles, at Wits and Wiggles, reviews her some movies.

There, Jon, Skippy, BlueGal.... Done I did some good?

Odds-on Favorite

Step right up, step right up! Your bookie Ned's taking yer Super Bowl odds, here...

I'm offering 3:1 that Bruce Springsteen flashes some tit...

Tysons Corner Mall, January 31, 2009

We Jingos moved out to rural western Loudoun County from suburban Reston some five years ago. At times we find ourselves questioning the wisdom of the move. The nearest grocery store is twenty minutes' drive away; the "high-end" one takes an hour round-trip. More than is reasonable, we lose power when a tree-limb knocks down the above-ground cables. The dirt road takes a heavy toll on automotive suspensions.

But then, occasionally, we will be reminded, with no subtlety whatever, of exactly why we made the move.

Last night was such a reminder. Betty attended her school's Homecoming night dance in DC, and the rest of us decided to make an evening of it, going to Tysons Corner Mall to catch a movie and dinner while she tripped the light fantastic with her classmates. For the non-locals, Tysons once owned bragging rights as the World's Largest Indoor Mall, losing them to Mall of America sometime in the Eighties.

In those Eighties, Wonder Woman and I lived in a two-room walkup in Brooklyn. For us, Saturday night often meant an F-train excursion into Greenwich Village for an evening of wandering, grazing, and (if we could afford it) catching somebody at Gerde's Folk City or some similar venue. People-watching was a huge aspect of the trip: New York's boho districts are unmatched for amusement. The huge assortment of delightfully offbeat people who might trundle by on any given evening provided an endless supply of entertainment. Simply being there was to participate in the celebration of the diversity of humanity.

Tysons Corner Mall on a Saturday evening in early 2009 is pretty much the diametric opposite of that experience.

First, the density of the crowd made it impossible to escape the thought: For a country that has, this week alone, shed 100,000 jobs with no end in sight, there sure were a whole lot of people out spending money on fripperies. Second, what the fuck are these people here for? Where's the appeal? Thousands upon thousands of people of every age, income group and ethnic identity, aimlessly wandering among exactly the same PacSuns, Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombies, Williams & Sonomas they'd find in any other mall...for what? They'd actually packed into their XTerras and Priuses with the thought in mind that the best kind of Saturday night consists of grabbing a plate of Heat-Lamp Italian and a large Sprite, wandering the halls of America's Fourth-Largest Mall, and seeing and being seen in this plastic zocalo, this carefully-policed polis?

After the movie,* I became separated from Wonder Woman and Freddie. Without their jokey and insulating company, without sympathetic people with whom I could ridicule things and distance myself from my surroundings, I began to notice that not a single shop in the place was aimed at me. Every one of these interchangeable emporia was intended to appeal to the tweener, the young adult with more money than sense, and the self-regarding yuppie. A deep alienation set in, with notes of anger and claustrophobia. I needed desperately to get out, breathe deep some cold air, declare forcefully my independence from this awful, antiseptic temple to consumption.

This morning, I awoke in a house in a clearing in a forest on the side of a mountain. The air is cold and bracing. Brave birds, wintering over, call overhead. A small herd of deer wanders past the window -- I wonder what they're eating this time of year. The dogs ignore them, as usual. I contemplate a breakfast of eggs and bacon. And I remember.

Yes, that's why we did this.
____

*"Taken," with Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA goon whose daughter is kidnapped for the "white-slavery" market. About as awful as you'd expect. We had three hours to kill, and that's what was showing. Horribly edited handheld-camera action sequences, revolting racial stereotypes, plot-holes you could drive an XTerra through, and a Jack Bauer torture scene. The movie's title pretty much summarizes how we felt afterward.

WTF????

Googled something last night. Can't even remember what. Everything behaved as normal. Found the info I was looking for, got out and on with my life.

This morning I had a particularly witty mot involving the Schrödinger's Cat paradox. (It was a peachamaroot!) Wonder Woman queried Schrödinger's Cat. I Googled it to send her a link. First return is from Wikipedia, natch. Click the link. I get this:

Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!
Suggestions:

• Return to the previous page and pick another result.
• Try another search to find what you're looking for.

Or you can continue to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat at your own risk. For detailed information about the problems we found, visit Google's Safe Browsing diagnostic page for this site.

For more information about how to protect yourself from harmful software online, you can visit StopBadware.org.

I click back to the Google return page. Every single return is marked "This site may harm your computer." Every stinking one. I clicked through to "Google's Safe Browsing " page for enlightenment. The first three attempts to load the page failed. When I finally got through, what I was presented with was astonishingly uninformative.

It's been a few weeks since I worked in the Internet industry. Have I missed a memo or something? Did the Great Gazoogle decide that scaring the crap out of everybody with intrusive interstitial pages warning of malware at innocuous sites like Wikipedia on every single search return was some kind of ideal business model?

[Wavy lines representing Bloggie-Boy actually trying to do some research...]
_____

Ah. It must have been a temporary bug, because I can't replicate it. But seriously, if Google can make a mistake of this magnitude -- even temporarily marking Amazon, eBay, etc., etc., etc., as containing malware -- there's gonna be some shit to pay.

Here's a discussion that, while also not particularly informative, at least proves I'm not crazy.

And perhaps most amusingly, if not surprisingly, a wingnut blogger leaps to the paranoid conclusion that the whole thing's a plot to prevent us from reading his pearls of wisdom...

Update: Google blames human error. Thanks, commenter Robert Z.

Update II: Commenter Reincheque observes that Google "boogered up them freds." Fuck, yeah!

Boogerin' Up the Freds

Last summer, my motorbike threw a nut. (What? A mid-Sixties British bike threw a nut? Unheard of!)

I was out in the field at the time, and as the nut in question held half of my handlebar on, I stopped in at a local garage to see what their mechanic could do. I know (oh, God, do I know!) that the standard of measurement for bikes of that era was the Whitworth standard, which was neither metric nor feet-and-inches, but rather something unique to British industry of the time. A Whitworth-standard nut is about as unlikely to be found in a modern American garage as a replacement carburetor for a Stutz Bearcat, but perhaps something could be done to help me limp home.

The mechanic, a very personable gentleman of the Southern persuasion, helped as much as he could. He found a nut that nearly (but of course not exactly) fit my handlebar. He put it in place carefully, torquing the thing so it would stay in place for a few miles, but not so forcefully that it would strip the bolt. He said, in his Virginia drawl, "Ah'm puttin' it on jes' so's you can git home. Couldn't tighten it too much, don't wanna booger up 'em freds."

(He meant "threads," of course.)

It's funny, isn't it, how a single utterance can stay with you. At first, it struck me only as a funny regional locution. But as the days wore on, it began to melt into my vocabulary and become a catch-all expression denoting pretty much any cock-up. Freddie trips and falls while defending at a soccer game: "Aw, man! He boogered up the freds!" Wonder Woman asks me for tech support on her computer: "Not having the latest Flash Player's gonna booger up the freds, every time. Let's download." Punt bounces off Antoine Randle-El's facemask -- again: "Jesus Christ, when are the Redskins gonna stop boogerin' up the goddamned freds?" The entire Bush administration seemed hell-bent on boogerin' up the freds with every thought, word and gesture.

I suppose the funniest thing about it is that I'm absolutely the only person on Earth to whom the phrase has the tiniest inkling of meaning. It was my motorbike, my hearing the phrase as funny, my brain applying it to every other life-circumstance, and if I were to come up to some stranger and warn this person that some contemplated action would be sure to booger up the freds, that person would be well justified in looking askance. Such is the fate of the linguistic solipsist.

But I do think the phrase deserves preservation. To that end, I have composed a hymn, to be sung in times when it seems the entire human race is intent on boogerin' up the freds. To the tune of "Gath'ring In the Sheaves" -- shall we, everybody?

Boog'rin' up the freds
Boog'rin' up the freds
We shall come rejoicing,
Boog'rin' up the freds!

FireFox vs. FireKitteh

Crashes around on your desktop, gets into places it shouldn't, has lots of cute add-ons, consumes minimal resources, generally makes life easier.


Crashes around on your desktop, gets into places it shouldn't, has lots of cute add-ons, consumes minimal resources, generally makes life much more amusing. Plus FireKitteh sits on your lap and makes adorable noises.

FireKitteh: WINNER!

Weatherbeaten

The town of Lovettsville, where I live a few miles outside town, is in the process of using an empty lot at the edge of town to erect a new post office. The old one, which has its funky mid-Fifties charms, has grown decrepit enough that a new facility is needed.

The lot on which the new office will go was the site of a home at least until 1944, and possibly later. I find the house on a 1910 USGS topographical map, but not on one (much less accurate) dated 1853. There's no visible evidence of the original structure (or at least none that we could find in our desultory search), but the spring-house remained on the lot, a reminder of what once had been there.

The town contracted with a friend of mine to disassemble the spring-house; the town's planning an educational park with a model nineteenth-century farm, and this structure is perfect for that purpose. A great deal of the lumber can't be recycled -- it's pretty weatherbeaten -- but the pieces can be used as patterns to cut new replacement parts. The parts of the frame that can be reused, we numbered carefully and stored.

Here's the building as we found it Friday morning. It might be a little over six feet tall at the peak of the roof.



Here's an interior shot. The foundation partly caved in some while ago, as these things will do if not maintained. There was standing water beneath the caved-in stones.


Here's the interior after half of the tin roof was removed. Some of the rafters were pretty badly rotted, and over the years an entire menagerie of different bugs -- mud-daubers, paper wasps, bees -- had built little civilizations between them.


Here Jeff risks life and limb removing tin roofing:


Getting down to rafters, now. I was Siding-Boy, working with a prybar to wrestle against square-profiled Victorian-era nails. I'd gotten three pieces off before breaking to take pictures.


I thought this discovery was pretty enchanting in its small way. There were two local sources for milled lumber in the late nineteenth century, and this builder had used both. One mill had a (for then) old-fashioned band saw that sawed in a linear, up-and-down motion. The siding came from that mill; see the saw-marks? Straight lines.


(The lumber used to make the loft in my cabin shows these straight saw-marks as well. I suppose there's a distinct possibility that that lumber came from that same mill. Likehood, even.)

The other mill, a more modern facility, used a circular saw. Note the curved saw-marks on this piece of framing:


Down to the framing, now. These are the parts that were numbered for later reuse. We found evidence of a window once having graced one of the now blank sides (the south side -- to the right in the photo -- which makes sense).



Good view here of the collapsed foundation:



When the frame was removed, the only wood structure left to dismantle was the foundation on which the frame rested. These logs were both hand-hewn and milled; we think they were roughed out where the tree was felled, and then cut to spec at the mill. The parts were lapped together -- and those laps were strong. Hardest bit to disassemble all day.


The ground was far too frozen to do any metal detecting, but we did find a few humdrum artifacts, the detritus of a hundred years ago. Here we have a suggestion that Paw might have liked to wander on down to the safety of the spring-house for a little nip of medicinal whiskey:


Now the foundation itself. The small front-loader you see here couldn't dig into the ground to get the lower stones; it could only deal with the above-ground parts you see here. They came back with a backhoe the next day to get at those. Everything we salvaged, down to the stones, is now safely in storage.

One note that bears making: Those stones were heavy. I was destroyed after lifting a few dozen into the front-loader. Now imagine that all day, every day, as a farmer, you had to plow those things out of the ground and hump them over to wherever you're piling them up. Then, when you've got enough to make the foundation of your spring-house, you hump them again. Every last single one of them, you and your sons (if you were lucky to have any).

"Paw, what are we doing today?"

"Humping stones."

"Uh-huh, and what're we doing tomorrow?

"Humping stones."

"What about Sunday?"

"Church. Then... humping stones."

What, did you think they had 'em delivered from Home Depot?


This wasn't quite the nearly mystical experience I wrote about in this post; this little springhouse is a good eighty years younger than the house we disassembled then. But it was a helluva way to spend a Friday.

Clip-n-Save

Someday far off in the distant future, some youngster somewhere, born after 2008, is going to say to you, "My history teacher's telling me that the Bush 43 Administration wasn't really all that bad. I think the man's being judged too harshly by history."

This is the point at which you pull out this link.

Jee-zis Christ!

I'm currently on item 210 -- out of 399 -- and I'm still thinking, Good God, they got away with that!

Breathe. In. Out.

At Last...

Aside from the indescribably delicious fact that the Obamas are the suavest, coolest, sexiest people on the planet; that Barack makes the rest of us men feel profoundly inadequate with one tiny lock of his knee in a slow dance (crap, why didn't I think of that?); and unless they're consummate, Oscar-worthy actors, these two beautiful people love each other very, very much, another observation suggests itself: Beyoncé can sing the living shit out of a standard. I like that.

It Is a Good Day

I was born in 1960. John F. Kennedy was assassinated on my third birthday -- one of the earliest memories I have, my parents (Kennedy liberals if ever there were any) sorrowfully telling me that I'd have to be a brave little man and put up with the cancellation of my birthday party. My childhood was a jumble of confusing imagery of terrible war in some place I'd never see, and riots and killings at home. I had some firsthand experience of institutional racism, I knew what the riots were about. The idea that black people were treated as second-class citizens seemed utterly absurd to me on its face. But there seemed to be a notion floating around that progress toward justice was inevitable, that what we needed to do was simply put our backs to the collective wheel, and things would work out OK.

Ronald Reagan was elected within a few days of my 22nd birthday. I was even then too young to know the full implications of his rhetoric -- his declaration that liberalism was dead, that the notion that the government was a benign force for the common weal was outdated and extinct. I thought of this as just a swing of the pendulum, that it would swing back to the side of the good.

I just didn't know it would take 25 years. (And, for that matter, I don't know if the pendulum actually has swung back. This feels like a beginning, not an end.)

And I couldn't have known how much thoroughgoing, vile, clear-eyed, deliberate evil would have to be perpetrated by the opponents of the idea of benign government before people's eyes would be opened, and the agents repudiated.

This thing took my entire lifetime to happen. This cycle lasted nearly fifty years.

This is a very good day indeed.



As I was walkin' I saw a sign there
And that sign said, "No Tresspassin'"
But on the other side -- it didn't say nothin'!
Now that side was made for you and me!

(Did you know Woody Guthrie lifted that melody from an old black Pentecostalist hymn called "When the World's on Fire"? Well, now you do.)

Color Commentary

If I never again hear Troy Goddamned Aikman use that extraneous "what" construction -- "McNabb is playing better than what he expected to" -- it'll be too soon. Just sayin'.

First quarter just over, and I'm picking Philly. We'll see if I have to eat my words.

Oh, and: In the car coming home from the grocery store, we listened to Springsteen's performance of "The Rising" at the Inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial. I'm afraid I lost it a bit.

Update, 1:10 left in the first half... Boy, I sure can pick 'em, can't I?

Update, 25-24 Philly up... Boy, I sure can pick 'em, can't I?

Update, Arizona wins, 32-25... Boy, I sure can pick 'em, can't I?

Great game. Why I loves me some American Football.

You Can Talk to Me

I really don't mind this blog becoming a space for All Things Beatle. There are plenty worse obsessions. Really. I could be crowing about Joe the Plumber's faceplant in Gaza, say, or excoriating the Wingnut of the Week. Instead, lets relax with this video, shall we?

Their Fabuliciousnesses in-studio, just as things were beginning to go to hell in a handcart -- February 11, 1968, EMI Studios, between 4pm and 2am. According to The Complete Beatles Chronicle, this was the first promotional film made by the brand-new Apple Films.

I hadn't revisited "Hey Bulldog" in quite some time, and am struck anew by its brilliance. Check out those searching minor-key chords under the "you can talk to me" bridge (Bm - Bm+5 - Bm6 - Bm7 - Em - Em+5 - Em6 - Em7 -- basically, a climbing chromatic passing tone). Also, the guitar solo -- which this time I believe to be George and not Paul -- is mid-Sixties Vox-amp guitar oinkage par excellence. Good stuff indeed. (In the film, George is shown playing a Gibson SG into a Vox amp, but I'm not sure I trust the accuracy of the synchronization of film to performance. The Fabs were in the process of moving to Fender amps at this point of their career, and the bell-like tone George gets for the solo could easily have been a combination of Fender amp and Leslie speaker. The literature is ambiguous on this point.)

Oh! And Lennon's voice is particularly biting in this recording. What a rock and roller.

Many thanks to reader BreadBox, who hipped me to this vid.

Vote Early, Vote Often

You could damage your karma-score worse than by voting for my X-Muss Song-Buddy Blue Girl for Best Diarist at that there Weblog Awards thing....

No One I Think Is in My Tree

John Lennon: The Life
Philip Norman
2008, Ecco, ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3

With several very large biographies of John Lennon in existence (most notably Ray Coleman's Lennon [1984] and Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon* [1988]) and countless rehashings of the Beatles' collective career (perhaps the most informative being Barry Miles' Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now [1997], written with full cooperation from its principal subject, and Jonathan Gould's beyond-excellent Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America), it's difficult to believe that any crucial biographical insights remain to be revealed about this mercurial and endlessly fascinating man.

Yet, having read all of the foregoing and a great deal of other Beatle literature besides (the depth of my abjection may be gleaned from the fact that I have worn out three -- yes, three -- copies of Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head), I found myself in amazement at some of the further historical detail that Norman has managed to uncover. It is, for example, astonishing to learn that Lennon's paternal grandfather, also named John Lennon, emigrated to America for a period in the 1880s, where he joined Andrew Robertson's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels. He was, put simply, an Anglo-Irish blackface minstrel, singing American music to American audiences fully 80 years before his grandson (whom he never saw) did more or less the same thing, if in less racially objectionable fashion.

Other myths are exploded, or clarified. Lennon's father Alf, while not completely rehabilitated into a loving father -- he could never be so described -- comes off rather better than previous accounts have suggested. His absences away at sea, later viewed by John as abandonment, are somewhat mitigated when placed in the context of World War II; and Alf's behavior upon his return from a long voyage to find his wife Julia Lennon in dalliance with a Welsh soldier is unexpectedly chivalrous. Fresh detail is added to the chaotic period during which the young Lennon was bounced around among relatives, finally ending up a ward of his aunt Mimi Smith and her husband George; the terrible scene in which the five-year-old was forced to choose between his father and his mother is fleshed out and given mitigating information, and is no less heartbreaking for it.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the Beatles will already know the rough outlines of the story told herein: The apprentice years of the Quarrymen, the trial by fire in the Hamburg clubs, the rise of Beatlemania, the endless touring that became more frightening to the band as it went on, the decision to end the torture that resulted in the studio-only band that provided us with some of the most innovative music ever committed to tape, the long, slow, acrimonious dissolution that left all four Beatles musically exhausted and emotionally beaten, and at last, the gut-punch to the world delivered by Lennon's bewilderingly meaningless assassination. Having witnessed these events scroll out through my own childhood and early youth, and having become obsessed occasionally to the point of madness with imbuing this nearly mythic tale with meaning and universal significance, I can say that it is enormously enjoyable to have a new retelling that adds so much fresh detail to the picture. Someone seeking interpretation of these events in Norman's biography, however, is in for disappointment, and is advised to look elsewhere. (I'd recommend beginning with Elizabeth Thompson and David Gutman's The Lennon Companion, a thoughtfully assembled collection of writings by journalists and intellectuals during and just after the Beatles' career; if you want to read, for example, the entire profile by the London Evening Standard's Maureen Cleave in which Lennon made his infamous "bigger than Jesus" remark, here is the place to look.)

The wealth of previously unrevealed details in The Life are the result of unprecedented access enjoyed by Norman to many of the players who have been unforthcoming until now, notably Neil Aspinall, who has refused to speak to writers or journalists since the Beatles' breakup, and Yoko Ono, who gave Norman extraordinary access not only to herself but also many primary-source materials in her archives. Norman also gained access to the letters of Mimi Smith, and the cooperation of Paul McCartney, George Martin, former Quarrymen, and various figures from the Liverpool beat scene of the early Sixties.

It is somewhat puzzling that Ono now disparages the biography as "mean to John," as the figure that emerges from it is entirely familiar: the angry, vulnerable, injured, sometimes tortured musical and verbal genius with a chip on his shoulder that's bigger than his head. The terrible misogynist whose mother-issues were subsumed in his bewilderingly complex relationship with a mystifyingly unlikely life-partner. The drug-addled mystic who somehow managed to express with razor clarity the confusions and contradictions of the psychedelic experience. The fierce rock-and-roller whose best-remembered song, "Imagine," contains not a whiff of Little Richard or Chuck Berry. The Janus who could be relentlessly cruel to friends and strangers alike, but who was capable of expressions of tenderness and love for exactly the same people. These are all things we have always known (or at least suspected) about Lennon, and things that we have almost entirely forgiven. It is not "mean" to render Lennon as a deeply complicated and conflicted man; it is simply the truth.

Any work of this size will contain flaws, and The Life is no exception. Norman, evidently not himself a musician, flounders a bit when discussing the detailed aspects, both musical and technical, of the Beatles' and Lennon's solo work. (Much better discussions of this are proffered by the aforementioned Ian MacDonald and in Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. Perhaps forgivably, given the paucity of material on her, the figure of Julia Lennon, while more fully realized here than elsewhere, still remains a shrouded enigma. Later in life (it is revealed here), Lennon confessed to sexual feelings toward her; Norman, while struggling mightily with the information, cannot give us a clear picture of their relationship, or why Julia brought forth such a forbidden impulse in her son.

One niggling transatlantic point: Norman, an Englishman, misinterprets an American expression. Alan Klein, while courting the Beatles as clients during the slow and frustrating dissolution of their partnership, promises to improve their personal financial situations. In so doing, he assures them he will fill their pockets with what Norman renders as "fuck you, money." Most of us on this side of the pond will recognize this as "fuck-you money," a subtle but not insignificant distinction.

Perhaps because he is a rough contemporary of the Beatles, Norman is particularly good at evoking the grimy post-war atmosphere of Britain in which the Beatles formed and came to fame. The subtle social-class differences among the four are brought into sharp contrast -- Lennon was not, as he did not prevent people from thinking, from the working class, and Ringo's family were absolutely dirt-poor. Mimi Smith would be driven to distraction all through their fame by Lennon's occasionally boorish public behavior that she considered beneath the upbringing she had given him. Particularly good, too, is Norman's evocation of the stifling postwar British popular culture, which was as flummoxed by Elvis Presley's raucous sexuality as the young Lennon and his contemporaries were intoxicated. It is very difficult for us, today, dazed by a cultural landscape that has shattered into a million shards of competing ephemera, to understand the giant monolith of conformity against which Lennon chafed so desperately in his youth. Indeed, what Lennon and the Beatles and their contemporaries achieved was the completion of the destruction of that monolith -- for good or ill, we have yet to know.

It is capital fun watching it play out.

----
*In his Acknowledgments, Norman calls Goldman's work "malevolent, risibly ignorant," and I would tend to agree. The clear indicator for me that I was reading a hack-job was Goldman's disparagement of Lennon's guitar playing, claiming that the Beatles and George Martin conspired to place Lennon's rhythm guitar low in the mix to hide it. This assertion is precisely "malevolent" and "risibly ignorant." That triplet strumming in "All My Loving" wasn't played by some piker, buddy.

Words Fail Me...

Jokes: Not Getting

There were a lot of jokes I didn't get as a kid.

Hell, quite a few jokes sail over my head even now; spend a few minutes at Three Bulls, you'll see what I mean.

But the not-getting-jokes-as-a-kid thing, it's reasonably easy to explain. Jokes that refer to cultural events that preceded one's birth, that require familiarity with some artifact or term of art from long ago, these will guarantee lack of comprehension -- and when you're six years old, pretty much everything happened before you were born.

Thus it was that when watching a Looney Tunes cartoon in my jammies on a Saturday morning circa 1968, the musical introduction of a slack-jawed yokel character with "The Arkansas Traveler" (you may know it better as "I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee") was a mystery. What the hell did a baby bumblebee -- the only lyric I might have been familiar with -- have to do with the clodhopper who just came onscreen? I couldn't possibly have known that "The Arkansas Traveler" was at the time of the cartoon's creation twenty or thirty years earlier, when vaudeville and traveling tent-shows were still very much a living memory, a common tune that was immediately known to its audience. Its lyric, which would have likewise been known to the audience (and which you can read here), details an encounter between a city slicker and a bumpkin fiddler whose roof leaks in the rain. Carl Stalling, the musical genius behind the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes franchises, was a man of his time; the use of "The Arkansas Traveler," while slightly baffling to me decades later, was a perfect choice.

The memory of this bafflement has been cropping back up lately. The Jingo family spent part of New Year's Eve at the First Night event in Leesburg near us -- a town-wide, family-friendly series of entertainments. Most memorable for me was a performance by ragtime pianist "Perfessor" Bill Edwards, who projected a Buster Keaton short ("One Week," 1920) and accompanied the action as a contemporary silent-film pianist would have. The YouTube link I just provided shows the last minute or two of the film, an absolutely masterful use of comedic irony in which a speeding train just misses a house that has been accidentally left on the track. Just as Keaton and his bride think they've dodged a bullet, another train from the opposite direction smashes their house to flinders. Good stuff.

But after the film, the "Perfessor" had to explain one in-joke. As the train smashes into the house, he had played a snippet of a contemporary song called "The Middle of the House" that sported the lyric, "The trains all come through the middle of the house/Since the company bought the land."

See? Jokes we don't get!

I know it's late to be on about Christmas music (thank FSM!), but here's another one of those musical jokes I've heard all my life without understanding:

"'Zat You, Santa Claus?" (short clip; pops)

It's the second sung phrase from Satchmo that contains the mystery. You've heard that phrase in approximately eighteen godzillion soundtracks, and it is absolutely invariably used when someone is sneaking around. (And it's hilarious -- but entirely uncoincidental -- that ''Zat You?" is built on the "sneaky cat/Sixteen Tons" chord progression we've explored here before.) So how did that particular phrase -- and a few others like it -- come to universally signify sneaking around? And where did it come from?

My first instinct -- immediately obviously wrong -- was to suspect "'Zat You?" as the ur-source. Looked up Satchmo's discography, found that he'd recorded it with The Commanders in 1953:

Louis Armstrong With The Commanders
October 22, 1953, New York, NY

Zat You, Santa Claus? (Fox) [master 85419] -- Decca 28943
Cool Yule (Allen) [master 85420] -- Decca 28943
Someday You'll Be Sorry (Armstrong, Louis) [master 85421] -- Decca 29280
The Gypsy (Reid, Billy) [master 85422] -- Decca 28995

Nineteen fifty-three is clearly much too late. This thing is much, much older than that. Jack Fox, the composer of "'Zat You?" was simply repeating the musical joke, the telling cliché, for effect, to give the song -- which imagines a visit from Santa as a slightly creepy experience -- a horror-house kind of air. No -- this joke was already old in 1953.

Then Wonder Woman, rather than trolling around at dusty discographical and musicological sites, simply Googled "sneaky music from cartoons." Clever, clever girl! That path leads to a MetaFilter site that speculates, " My best guess is that it evolved out of Zamecnik's "Mysterioso - Burglar Music 1" in Sam Fox Moving Picture Music Volume 1 (scroll down for link to MIDI), which was published in 1913 and was apparently the first widely distributed collection of silent film music."

A-HA!

Here it is! All the way from 1913! (Well... Through the magic of MIDI and the ability to read music, at any rate.) (pops)

Some folks in a BroadwayWorld discussion forum were chatting about this little musical mystery last October, and commenter Best12Bars, a person of great wisdom and perspicacity, observed:

Before my grandfather went to work for the Warner brothers as their accountant (and later Exec. VP Treasurer), he played nickelodeon piano for silent films in New York. He played only for a short period of time but really well, and he couldn't read a note of music. Most of the silent movie piano players in the city would share and swap themes, learn from each other, steal from each other, etc.

That's why I'm guessing it was passed around during those early formative days, just like a folk song was passed around. A note was changed here, a melody line there, and eventually it crept into the public conscience as a "known ditty." Yet, nobody knows exactly where it came from or who wrote it.

Brother (or sister), you said a mouthful.