On the Futility of Labor and Vice Versa

The sonsabitches actually made me work today. Of all the nerve.

Halfway through a post on Yankee vs. Secesh girls and the trouble they get up to.

Worth coming back for. Wait'll you get a load of this Quaker skirt! Grrrr!

Burn, Baby, Burn

Adjacent Wal-Marts May Dodge Size Curbs
Calvert Had Stopped Supercenter Plans

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 7, 2005

Robin Gottlieb cringed when she learned of Wal-Mart's plans to build a store the size of three football fields near her home in Dunkirk, a cozy hamlet in Southern Maryland ringed by rolling tobacco fields. The 44-year-old librarian feared it would overwhelm her tightknit community and usher in even more development.

After intense lobbying from Gottlieb and her neighbors, Calvert County officials passed tough regulations last summer that limited the size of big-box stores in quaint town centers such as Dunkirk's. Gottlieb and her friends arranged to cheer the victory with celebratory drinks.

But Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, appears to have hit upon a novel way around the rules: divide the store in two.

In what company officials are calling one of the first arrangements of its kind in the country, Wal-Mart plans to build a 74,998-square-foot store cheek by jowl with a 22,689-square-foot garden center. The two Wal-Marts -- each with its own entrance, utilities, bathrooms and cash registers -- would have a combined area 30 percent larger than the 75,000-square-foot limit for a single store in Dunkirk.

The tactic is the latest example of Wal-Mart's increasingly creative responses to the scores of jurisdictions, including Prince William and Montgomery counties, that have passed regulations limiting the size and location of big-box stores.

Mia Masten, community affairs manager for Wal-Mart's eastern region, said she believed the Dunkirk site would be the first time the Bentonville, Ark., company will build two side-by-side stores in response to size restrictions. It is a strategy that Wal-Mart is likely to consider in other areas, she said.

"As these big-box bills come up, all retailers will just have to be flexible," she said. "In this case, we developed a model that allowed us to reach our customers."

She then emitted a banshee shriek, unhinged her jaw and used her hideous clawed talons to throw in a snack of three human infants, who died screaming in her fire-belching gullet...

Can you dig the pure, unalloyed evil in that last graf? "We developed a model that allowed us to reach our customers..."

As if, in attempting to protect their rural homes from being bulldozed over by salivating, union-busting greedheads, this Communist librarian (Jesus, a librarian!) was taking food from the mouths of Mia Fucking Masten's children.

When the Revolution comes, the first person I will chain to the back of my car and drag around a burning Wal-Mart parking lot will be Mia Masten, community affairs manager for Wal-Mart's eastern region.

Mia's a busy little Minion of the Dark Lord of the Underworld. She has her talons in lots of pies.

Grover Cleveland Didn't Do Jack

Yeah, so Bobby Lightfoot does batshit insane re-captioning of New Yorker cartoons for giggles, and gives us Dadaist reworkings of the old Spy Magazine "Separated At Birth?" feature and generally kuts a kookie figure. That'd be enough, because that aspect of it is hernia-inducingly funny. I mean, I couldn't breathe in for about 30 seconds after seeing that cartoon up there.

But he also writes insightful shit about his life in music, shit that's both keenly perceptive:

Rufus Wainwright reminds me of Tom Waits, in that he pursues a very specific esthetic that is eclectic and eschews that which is "tasty", "punchy" and "sleek". His works are unapologetically ambitious and his approach makes me think that perhaps he knows his days of commercial viability are numbered. There is a desperation, a cramming-in of ambitious and difficult music that connotes a desire to get it out while the getting is good.

And snot-blasting funny:

If [Avril Lavigne's Under My Skin] were my dog I would drown it and bury it with its head above ground that the insects and beasts of the forest could slowly devour the skin and eyes, leaving only the skull with its weeping eye sockets.

The fact that he's my disgustingly overtalented kid brother's got nothing to do with it.

Oh, and In Answer to Your Question...

Yes, a bear does in fact shit in the woods.

Johnny Archaeology

So this house that we Jingos moved out to back last summer....

I don't believe you've been properly introduced.



Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to live somewhere old. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm a United Statesian, because not much this side of the Pond can truly be considered old; the difference between Europeans and Americans, it's said, is that the Euros think that a hundred miles is a long way, while we Yanks think that a hundred years is a long time. And oh dear God do we destroy old things. It's amazing how enthusiastically we destroy old things.

So when Wonder Woman and I found a house in remotest Loudoun that had grown up around an 1780s log cabin -- a place that, astonishingly, we could actually afford -- it was as if a lifetime of yearning had finally fulfilled itself. Now I type this in a fireplace-heated room with adze marks on the log walls that date to the winter when Washington was at Valley Forge. I can't help bragging on it a little; it's just really fuckin' cool.

Immediately upon moving in, I realized I had set myself up for a lifetime of happy obsession. Indisputably excellent architectural restorers, the previous owners don't seem to have been particularly interested or emotionally involved with the history of the property. They certainly didn't leave me with much in the way of a provenance. Me, I want to try to get inside the very skin of the people who lived here. I'm after what Tony Horwitz, in his Confederates in the Attic, termed the "history high." This exalted state, aspired to by hardcore historical reenactors, comes when you've managed to altogether slough off all mental trappings of modernity, and have achieved the illusion that you have actually time-tripped to your chosen period.

I don't think I'm quite that hardcore, but I do believe that I am on a mission to find and accost the people who lived on this land before me, wrest their secrets from them. It's the least I owe them. "Who Built Neddie's House?" is the question at hand, and I simply can't in good conscience continue to live in their house without searching for an answer.

All of which comes to explain how I came to be in the Antique Records Room at the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg a few days ago, poring over two-century-old property deeds and tax and marriage records written in magnificent copperplate hand. Boy, those kids knew from neat handwriting.

The way you trace these things is that each property deed will refer back to the deed by which the seller acquired the land. So if Mr. Foo sold a parcel to Mrs. Bar, the deed of that transaction will refer to the deed by which Mr. Foo acquired the parcel from Mr. Squatch some years before. You should thus theoretically be able to hopscotch back in time to the first deed.

But of course, there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, as the man said, and I've gotten hung up in 1874. A local farmer named Long probably deeded a legacy parcel to his daughters, who sold the property in that year. But I can't find the deed by which the daughters acquired the land.

So trying to clear this up I've been closely reading these surveyors' descriptions of my parcel (in the course of this stuff I've become something of a maven on the history of land surveying, but that's another post). Reading these things is a bit of an art, and it helps if you have a paper and pencil to sketch what's being described.

So on this deed dated 1874, I found this description of my land:

"Beginning at 1) a set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house; thence with Kidwell, Everhart and others N 63 E 98 40/100 poles to (2) a stone with an X cut in it, corner to Miss R. Boothe, thence down the hill with her line S 25 1/2 E 27 poles..."

Waitaminnit. Say what!?!?

"A set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house..."

Now, hang on. Let's work out that thicket of pronoun antecedents. "A set stone corner to Stevens and in C.W. Kidwell's line near his house..."

His house? Kidwell's?

"...In Kidwell's line near his house..."

There's no house there. I've been back there. I've looked.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

A set stone corner to Stevens...



"...In Kidwell's line near his house..."



Do you see it? Do you see it?

Scrabbling uphill to get a better look, I nearly stumbled into this. Always wondered where that tiny constant trickle down the end of the yard came from. Now I know. Kidwell's springhouse. Still producing.



The once-proud main entrance to the yard, the garden gate. Welcome home!



An outbuilding foundation:



This one's a little hard to parse, so I'll give it to you twice: Once as-is...



And once with an overlay. See the outline of the building foundation? Three sides stone, one side timber, I'm guessing.



At this point, I guess the question is, What do I do with this? The house isn't on my land, and while I do have the name of the owner, what do I do? Hey, buddy -- do you know what you've got on your propitty? You just gonna let that decay into nothing? Can I buy it off you?

Oh, one more thing: I followed his property wall up the mountain as far as it would go, and found this:



Now I know where all that banging was coming from last deer season. Sure would be a shame if that deer-blind met with some kind of accident, now wouldn't it?

Server Logs Are Funny Things...

I've kind of forbidden myself from poring over the Jingo server logs, watching who clicks what -- which is a good thing because it was getting to be a bit of a nasty obsession. The Pickle Fublic -- sorry, that should be Fickle Public, the Cointreau and Robitussin must be kicking in -- can be a puzzling bunch of fuzzbunnies.

But that doesn't mean I've given it up entirely.

One of the things I can get with Statcounter is a list of search queries that people have conducted in order to wind up here. Usually they're pretty straightforward. But how the hell the person who searched on "Gay Manassas" at Google wound up at By Neddie Jingo! will forever be a mystery -- not to mention the occasion of just a teensy little frisson of homosexual panic. When the C&R wears off, I mean. Meanwhile, I hope you bookmarked me.

Come to think of it, John Mobberly did look kinda dishy.

Slap-Nuts Funny

Jesus' General. You heard it here...uh...probably 67,098th.

Never in a Million Years

It might have been during the Alleghenian Orogeny, in the Permian Period of the Paleozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon, which is to say about 286,000,000 years ago, that a series of floods and evaporations, lasting a few million years each, deposited layers of mud and silt on a flood-plain on the part of the Earth that would eventually become what its hominid inhabitants were pleased to refer to as the East Coast of the United States of America. This floor finally dried up completely, was heaved heavenward by the tectonic plate movement that produced the Blue Ridge Mountains, and produced this egg-sized object:



This little rock survived floods and fires and dinosaur-killing meteor-impacts, sometimes buried underground, sometimes exposed to the open air, slowly eroding here and there, until, 286,000,001 years later, a hapless hominid goober whose entire species had inhabited the planet for considerably less than 5/286th of the life of this rock, and 1/4,500th of the life of the planet, and whose own existence had lasted for about 1/102,272,727th of that span, walking his canine goobers along the Maryland bank of the Potomac River one day, used his spanking-new, highly fashionable opposable thumb to pick it up.

And promptly, with the savoir-faire characteristic of his species, shattered it into bits.

The reason, I'm sure, that we still to this day have to endlessly refight the Scopes Monkey Trial is simply that we silly little human beings are just not capable of comprehending what A Million Years means. I was trying just now at dinner to explain the idea to Betty and Freddy. To children who are quite convinced that the entire universe came into being the instant the OB/GYN smacked their little meconium-encrusted buttocks, the idea of Weird Old Dad trying to get them to understand the howling, yawning gulfs of geological time over Swedish meatballs and egg noodles was pretty risible. I can't imagine I'd have much more luck with your average Southern Baptist.

After 44 years on this planet. I think have a pretty good grasp of what a hundred years means. Plenty of cultural upheaval, plenty of cosmetic change to the earthly landscape, lots of human activity. Three generations born and died. 1905 to 2005? Yeah, I get it. Takes a bit of reading, a bit of empathy, but I get it.

Geologically, of course, it doesn't even register as a nanosecond.

I also flatter myself that I can comprehend a thousand years. One day long ago I stood in the reliquary of the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, contemplating the marble steps that led down to the display of a fingerbone of the Apostle James, noting soberly that a thousand years' worth of pilgrims had worn deep foot-shaped twin grooves into the stone. It was quite eerie to think that those stones had begun to be ground down by the worn shoes of hopeful people at some point in the Norman Conquest of Britain. The wearing away of the stone had continued through the Magna Carta, the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the First and Second World Wars, and on up to today. A thousand years.

Still, of course, nothing but a geological eye-blink. My little striated rock snaps its fingers and barks a contemptuous laugh.

Now, try to wrap your brain around A THOUSAND THOUSAND YEARS. Not one time through all that stuff up there, not ten times through, not even simply many times. I mean TEN HUNDRED TIMES TEN HUNDRED YEARS. All of that stuff, from William the Conqueror down (aaaaaall the way down!) to George W. Bush, a thousand times. We can say "a million years" to ourselves over and over, and never understand what we mean. It's simply too immense a thing to comprehend.

In the history of this planet, it's the Second Hand going around the clock ONCE. That's ONE MINUTE, in Geology Time.

So I don't hold much (not much) contempt for people who insist against overwhelming evidence that Grandpa Weren't No Monkey. That little striated rock that just crumbled in your hand, that little clod of schmutz that you just hamfisted into dust, that rock is, quite literally, older than you can possibly understand....

The impulse against Darwinian evolution arises from an understandable desire for certainty, against random chance. Of course it also arises from just good ol' human hubris, from a refusal (or inability) to acknowledge the relatively recent discovery that we've inhabited a 4.5 billion-year-old rock in space for the tiniest, most infinitessimally insignificant doink of its existence. We can't possibly be an accident! We must be here for a reason!

Here's Richard Dawkins, in his concluding paragraphs to The Blind Watchmaker:

We have sought a way of taming chance, of drawing its fangs. "Untamed chance," pure, naked chance, means ordered design springing into existence from nothing, in a single leap. It would be untamed chance if once there was no eye, and then, suddenly, in the twinkling of a generation, an eye appeared, fully fashioned, perfect and whole. This is possible, but the odds against it will keep us writing noughts till the end of time. The same applies against the spontaneous existence of any fully fashioned, perfect and whole being, including -- I see no way to avoid the conclusion -- deities.

To "tame" chance means to break down the very improbable into less probable small components arranged in a series. No matter how improbable it is that an X could have arisen from a Y in a single step, it is always possible to conceive of a series of infinitessimally graded intermediates between them. However improbable a large-scale change may be, smaller changes are less improbable. And provided we postulate a sufficiently large series of sufficiently graded intermediates, we shall be able to derive anything from anything else, without invoking astronomical improbabilities. We are allowed to do this only if there has been sufficient time to fit all the intermediates in.... (My emphasis.)

If all the foregoing is a bit dense, let's call up another source for our conclusion, another of Life's Great Philosophers:

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.

-----
Postscript: If you're a geologist or an evolutionary biologist, I freely admit to pulling nearly all of that science gobbledegook right outta my fundamental aperture: I know precisely squadoosh about geology and what I know about evolution I got from Dawkins' book, which is an utterly compelling read and reinforces everything I've ever suspected about the nature of reality. The geology I got from a .edu site at The College of William and Mary. I probably misread all of it.

But I guarantee, you still can't imagine a million years.

We Kid Because We Love

If Ailes had his way, he would muffle
Any copy employing "kerfluffle"
Let us send to his eyrie
A nice dictionary
That up his rear end he can stuffle

Like an Iodine Contrast X-Ray

Remember this pic?



I took the photo a few weeks ago to vaguely wave at the general area where Civil War Psycho John Mobberly took advantage of his intimate knowledge of the local mountain paths to guide remnants of Elijah White's Comanches over Short Hill to attack an encampment of Yankees outside Lovettsville.

Wellsir, since I took the picture we've had us a little snowfall.



Ain't it just transcendently weird what Mother Nature will do sometimes, her wonders to perform...?

You couldn't get a better look at Egg Path if you'd shot high-contrast iodine into Short Hill's veins and took an x-ray... That path is completely invisible unless it's snowed...

Up next on the Mobberly Trail: There's nothing like a dame. Or three dames, in this case.

I Wish Somebody Would Tell Me What Diddy-Wah-Diddy Means

On a weekend day just before the Recent End of the World in Ice, we Jingos packed into the family jalopy to run some mundane errands. For once in my life, I was able to gainsay young Betty in the matter of the radio station -- avoiding an enervating immersion in our local Clear-Channel Suckfest, which inevitably induces in me mild nausea, accompanied by the urge to lecture crankily.

Instead I was treated to a pleasant moment with National Treasure Dick Spottswood's Obsolete Music Show on our public station.

I love American roots music just as much as the next gink, and I've got a pretty good storehouse of knowledge about it -- quite a lot of it gleaned from listening to Spottswood -- but I don't think I've ever had my neck wrenched quite so violently by anything I've heard on the radio as when he played a set of Blind Blake's ragtimes. Ho-lee jumpin' catphish, where have they been hiding this guy since 1927?



I've only been able to find one recording of his this morning, and you can listen to "Diddy Wah Diddy" here, or you can poke around in Spottswood's archive of the show (Dick starts talking about Blake at 1:37:45 - at least check out the first cut, "West Coast Blues," which will just knock you out)-- seriously, it's worth the effort, because I haven't been so ass-smacked by a guitar player since I first heard Django Reinhardt 25 years ago. (OK, acoustic guitarist -- Danny Gatton is still the Telecaster Christ...)

Listen to the guitar breaks in "Diddy Wah" -- it's like he's got extra fingers on each hand -- there's no other explanation for his ability to play multiple alternating bass notes while carrying a complex melody. Plainly, he set himself the task of replicating ragtime piano on guitar, and succeeded better than absolutely anyone. Just stunning stuff -- and I've been through all your Reverend Gary Davises, your Tampa Reds, your Blind Lemons, your Blind Willie McTells -- Blind Blake leaves the whole vision-impaired bunch a little sick.

(I leaned over to Wonder Woman at one point in the experience, whispered that I thought I needed The Operation... What operation? she asked suspiciously. You know... the eyes. They've gotta go.... Gotta have 'em plunked out if I'm ever to progress as guitar player....)

Here's an excellent biographical article on Blind Blake.

One other gem in Spottswood's show last week: Check out Onie Wheeler's "Bonaparte's Retreat" (at 1:00:09) -- If you were wondering where Tom Waits gets his inspirations for his acid-addled flea-circus arrangements, I don't think you need to look any farther. What a strange, strange piece of music....

Hell-Hounds on My Trail

[N.B.: The Mavens of Blogging strongly caution against blog-posts without accompanying graphics -- apparently you clowns just can't handle a couple of paragraphs of text unadorned by shiny and colorful objects to gaze at -- but Your Ned is at home during a snowstorm down four miles of copper wire that produce modem speeds that would have been laughed at in 1995. Seriously, I'm getting 28.8 speeds here, it's flippin' EXCRUCIATING... So no uploads today: The glorious prose will simply have to stand on its own.]

Last week, pursuant to his Mobberly duties, your Ned investigated the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship, a nature-trails-and-local-history operation over on the other side of Short Hill. Rumor had it that a house where Mobberly had been wickedly ambushed by Perfious Yankeedom only to escape by the skin of his teeth was being excavated by the minions of Professor Quackenbush. (Whether this is actually that residence or merely a historical chimera is awaiting confirmation; I have written to the Professor under the assumed guise of Nosirrah Doowrehs, a Levantine dealer in Civil War antiquities and other curiosities, and am awaiting his promised reply. Please don't tell him it's actually me!)

At the Blue Ridge Center, an affable young man who identified himself as Ron greeted me and gave me the run of the place. A 900-acre nature preserve dedicated to ecological experimentation and historical preservation just south of Loudoun Heights, it is dotted with both butterfly habitats and the ruins of early-nineteenth-century farmhouses, which are being studied by Quackenbush and his henchmen for clues to the whereabouts of Prince Roderick's Purloined Orb. It is one of these farmhouses that purports to be my Mobberly locale.

The gloaming encroached as I glimmed the ruin, mentally reconstructing the events described in dusty tomes I have unearthed. (Should Professor Quackenbush confirm my -- sorry, Doowrehs' -- theory, I'll blog it in the near future, but for now it must remain a tantalizing dream.) Time passed, and the gloaming stopped the glimming, and, glum, I made my way back to my truck. Ron was shuttering the office cabin as I passed him. I asked him if I could return some day soon with my kids and dogs; they'd enjoy the place in fine weather.

Ron suddenly looked stricken and pale, the face of a man who's been badly frightened. "Keep away from there with your dogs, mister," he stammered. "You don't know what's out there. I'm telling you, man, keep away!" This last was hissed gutturally, his features tightened and anxious. "Just keep away!

He disappeared in the dusk.

It was not until the next morning, as I browsed the local Loudoun Times-Mirror over my coffee, when the full purport of Ron's warning became clear. Here I reproduce the complete article, with not one word omitted:

KILLER DOGS RUNNING LOOSE IN NEERSVILLE

Three killer dogs are running free in the Neersville area of western Loudoun -- and Animal Control wants them.

On Feb. 4, the dogs broke into a pasture at the Blue Ridge Center for Environmental Stewardship on Harpers Ferry Road between Purcellville and the West Virginia border, killing 90 chickens and injuring several sheep, according to Rob Carey, the center's spokesman.

The dogs -- a Rottweiler with a chain collar, a black Lab/Rottweiler mix and a long-haired tan dog -- were spotted again the following weekend, Carey said, when they acted aggressively toward a man who was hiking with his dogs on the Blue Ridge Center's trails.

Animal Control set traps around the property for the dogs but has not yet found them. They apparently cross back and forth between Virginia and West Virginia, said Animal Control spokeswoman Laura Danis.

If you see these dogs, call Animal Control at 703-777-0406.

-----

I've got some better advice: If you see these dogs, bend over and kiss your ass an affectionate goodbye, because your doom is sealed. The Hounds of Hell have been unleashed, and it is time to rue the day you ever crossed swords with Quackenbush...

Up Next on the Mobberly Trail: Short Hill Reveals Her Secrets

My Bologna Has a First Name

Far-distant-future scientists working with hypersensitive technologies beyond our puny modern ken* may come up with a nano-unit to express the degree to which I give a shit about the Oscars, but they sure aren't there yet. There are (I am told) entire subcults within the porn audience driven into paroxysms at the spectacle of a spinally pliable man gobbling his own perpendicular bisector -- but the frisson stirred by such a sideshow event is as dust in the wind compared to the movie industry performing the same feat. Suck away, say I.

-----
*My sources advise me that the Puny Modern Ken won a a nod for Best Self-Fellating in a Short Feature, but this is as yet unconfirmed.

How to Write an Earworm

Do you know what an earworm is? It's a song so damned catchy that all you have to do is hear it once and it will stick in your head until you either a) drink yourself blind, b) get smacked in the head with an eight-iron, or c) die. I'm given to understand there are other cures, but at exactly this moment I'm really not in a hurry to try them out.

I've been having a nice long wallow in Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles demos-and-lost-tracks series, and I've gotten the happiest earworm infection I've had since 1989, when I first heard XTC's "Mayor of Simpleton."

The tune in question is called "I Can't Tell What Truth Is Anymore," on Volume 6. Lyrically, you might be tempted to read it as an anthem for our defeated and disgusted times, but really it's just a boy-loses-girl song. It couldn't be a simpler bit of bubblegummy fluff -- I can easily imagine it tootling along during the Obligatory Slapstick Chase Scene in an early Scooby-Doo cartoon. It's the sort of dangerously sticky-sweet cinnamon bun that Partridge can easily toss out endlessly in his sleep (think "Cherry in Your Tree," or the above "Mayor of Simpleton"), a talent he sometimes disparages as beneath his dignity, not knowing what it's like to spend your life wishing you could write just one song that catchy.

Even though it's only a demo, a candidate for an album (Nonsuch) that never made it past the winnowing process, the thing is as expertly crafted, as architecturally perfect a bit of candyfloss as you're like to come across this year. Ergo, earworm.

I've extracted the song (Andy won't mind. Go and buy the CD.), and you can hear it here. (It will pop a new browser window. When the tune starts to play, move that window aside and come back to this window. Mom.)

So why's this particular song so damned skillfully done? What's the formula, Mister Wizard?

1. Start with an introductory phrase that twists the melody very slightly. In this case, the hook phrase is rendered in a minor mode, so one note is different from the way you'll hear it in the rest of the song. A deft application of a cliché. (Clichés are sometimes exactly what's called for in this particular artform.)


2. Repeat that slightly twisted melody only twice more: Once to introduce the instrumental passage, and once to end the song. Symmetry.


3. It certainly doesn't hurt to stick to primary-color I-IV-V chords in your verse and chorus. Meat and potatoes. Predictable. Solid.


4. But in your middle eight, go ahead and throw in an F#dim7 chord (under "And if you've gone for good"...) to suggest incompletion and anxiety. And of course write your lyrics so that the most significant word in the whole song, the revelation of the cause for our narrator's anxiety -- "gone" -- falls exactly on that diminished chord. You do this because you're a fucking pop-songcraft god.


5. End your middle eight on that protracted V chord. Oh, absolutely, yes. Again, a cliché, but this is a bubblegum song, not the Coffee Cantata. When you play the song live, you can stretch that suspension out over, hell, 32 bars, before crashing back down to the tonic to start the next verse -- just like the rising ahhh's in "Twist and Shout." They'll have to disinfect the theater seats.


6. Hint forward. In literature, it's called "foreshadowing." Listen to the lovely little chiming arpeggiated twin-guitar figures under the main melody. It will assume more importance later.


7. Harmony vocal below the melody. Think late Beatles, think "Come Together," think "The One After 909." Partridge does this as a matter of habit, believing that the highest voice is the one that stands out. It's pretty rare, especially in late XTC records, for vocal harmonies to ride over the lead vocal like a bluegrass duet. And man, it's used to cool effect here.


8. The guitar solo isn't really a solo at all; it's a carefully composed instrumental passage, as formal as a minuet. Needless to say, it's an absolute knockout. The Clapton-voiced guitar states a new melody as the little chiming figure revolves. Then a small male choir picks up the figure that had been played by the twin guitars under the verse (see why that foreshadowing was so important?) as the Clapton guitar now begins to play the verse melody. The two figures twine beautifully together, to end with both entities playing the title line, the male voices taking the low harmony and the guitar the melody. Subtle, understated, classically symmetrical -- did you ever think you'd hear those words describing a passage in a bubblegum song?


9. In the outro, have the male voices pop back up with the same figure they sang in the instrumental passage. More symmetry.

It looks so simple from the outside, but once you tease it open, its insides are as finely wrought and carefully balanced as an expensive watch. A thing of incandescent beauty.

On One's Male Role Models

Once upon a long-ago time, Your Ned played second base on a company softball team. We were just awful -- in the two years I graced that team, I think we won maybe one game.

During one early autumn evening game, I was at bat. Standing at the plate waiting for the next pitch, I noticed that a V of Canada geese had appeared flying very low in the sky, straight in from deadaway center field toward home plate, just barely high enough to clear the backstop. It was beautiful, a real autumn treat.

I raised my hand to the ump, asking for time. Then I stepped out of the box and stood watching the geese fly by. I murmured something like, "Would you look at that..."

Behind me, the other team's catcher simply exploded. "What the fuck are you doing? Play ball, asshole!

Huh. Priorities.

Let us propose that there are two extremes in the male psyche, always at war with each other. Let us further propose that it's that war in our heads that is responsible for most of the bad craziness in the world today.

Religious and philosophical and literary smart guys have long recognized the problem, and sought to define it in various ways: Yin and Yang, Dionysus and Apollo, Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan, intuition and rationality. They all agree that when the two halves are in balance, sanity reigns.

Ah, what a crock of shit.

Bill Lee has written a new book, describing his life after his 1984 banishment from baseball for possession of Yin with intent to distribute, and criminal dearth of Yang. He's knocked around various pro-am, semi-pro, and other, downright weird back alleys of non-major-league ball. What's beautifully evident is that he's lost none of the wonderful cranky eccentricity that made me admire him so the first time around.

Among his exploits was a run for the American Presidency in 1988 on the Canadian Rhinoceros Party ticket -- a Dadaist political party with stated aims to "... abolish the environment rather than protect it on the grounds that it took up too much space to keep clean.... Bulldoze the Rocky Mountains so that Alberta could receive a few extra minutes of daylight.... Paint the White House pink and turn it into a Mexican restaurant.... A ban on guns and butter, since they both killed."

Hell, I'd have voted for him if I'd only known.

Of course this guy couldn't make it in pro sports: Completely unable to knuckle under to the pumped-up Yang of pro baseball, he flaunted his Yin in its face until it wouldn't take it any more and bit back. Poor bastard just refused to go along to get along.

Why is it that all my heroes seem to conform to this model to some extent or another?



So let's posit a spectrum that has Bill Lee over on one extreme and, oh, I dunno, say, Bernie Kerik waaaay over on the other. On Bill's side, there is laughter and surprise and reveling in serendipity. There's understanding Dada art, there's receptiveness to novelty, there's the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head simultaneously without exploding.

Over on Bernie's side, you've got... well... Bernie Kerik. Play ball, asshole!

I will never be a CEO. I will never lead armies of men. I will never win political office -- even on the Rhinoceros Party platform -- an Oscar, People's Sexiest Man Alive.

I will, I'm afraid, always and forever, admire the geese.

Truth is Never Told During the Nine-to-Five Hours

I'm too gutted, been fighting tears all day, at this morning's horrifying news to do much by way of tribute to Hunter Thompson. He'd probably rag me mercilessly for my weakness, but there you have it. I'm not him.

Let's say this: I haven't taken acid in 25 years, but when I did, it was his voice that narrated the trip. Not Timothy Leary, not Ram Dass, none of those running dogs of icky hippie sentimentality. No, on a Thompsonian acid trip you weren't out to complete your soul or come to the realization of the Fundamental Oneness of All Living Beings or any of that Girl Scout shit: You wallowed in your alienation, you wore your rage like a cheap clown suit, you welcomed the terminally weird as a long-lost brother, you ripped the needle off "Birth of the Cool" and cranked "Trout Mask Replica" out the window: "You hear that, you boozhie motherfuckers? That's MY HEAD! That's going on up in there RIGHT NOW, and if you want it to stop, you're going to have to come up here and KILL ME!" Followed with a cackle of maniacal laughter and a hurled bottle smashing in the street.

Well, I guess we know where that leads, eh?

But I just can't get over the timing of Hunter's surrender, in these Days of Darkness in the Year of the Pig. I know who I blame, and I'm gunning for your asses....

America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

I was able to find this anecdote at an Esquire site, it's from Gene McGarr, a buddy of Thompson's when they were young:

Hunter came over one night. I was out working. I never bothered locking my door, because anybody who wanted to climb five flights of stairs and rob from me, they were welcome to. This was a hot summer night. All the windows in the block were open.

Hunter, apparently feeling a little frisky and being bored waiting around for me and not knowing when I was coming home, went into the front room, the windows opening out on the street, took off his belt, and started whipping the wall. You know, this loud thwack! Every time he'd thwack the wall, he'd yell, "Ahgggh!! Ahghhh! Aghhhh!"

Then he'd stop the thwacking and in another voice would say, "Do it again. Do it again. Keep doing it." And then this thwaaaack! So apparently there were people hanging out of windows yelling, "You son of a bitch! You can't get away with that...!" Then Hunter put his belt back on and sat down.

Well, about five minutes later there were the thundering hoofbeats of two New York City policemen, who by the time they had climbed five flights of stairs were truly apoplectic. They banged on the fucking door.

Now Hunter sat with, you know, his cigarette in hand, beer in the other and said "Who's there?" Two cops came in. They wanted to know what the fuck was going on. They had heard the complaints. They wanted to know, where were the bodies. They made Hunter take his shirt off. To show that he had no whip marks on him.

Things Appall A Fart

I have come to realize that yesterday's post on the Sixties was a tad bit puerile. I wasn't at the top of my game yesterday, emotionally or intellectually, and what came out was a bit of a strident blort. I won't redact it, though, because, well, I was who I was yesterday and I yam what I yam today. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes. And this complete breakfast. And 120 rockin' milligrams of headache-bustin' Indomethacin.)

But I did have a point to make, and I stand by that point. Let's try to get at it from a slightly more oblique angle, eh?

I think it was the nearly universal reaction to Paul McCartney's appearance at the Super Bowl that set me off on this binge: Ooh, 2003's halftime show was so shockin', woah Janet's titty and Nellie crotch-grabbin' and woo I'll have you naked by the end of this song, let's get the OLD GUY in here STAT, the SAFE ANCIENT DODDERING OLD FART who'll lull a raw and restive world back into its warm cocoon with lullabies of disposable nostalgia and songs your mother should know...

And Paulie had a nice, full-throated Liverpoodle Larff at all our expense. And nobody knew it.

He led off with Drive My Car, one of the funniest, slyest, nudge-nudge-wink-wink extended sex jokes that's ever been pulled -- beep-beep-mmm-beep-beep, YEAH!...

And not a single swingin' dick under the age of about six hundred years old got the goddamned joke.

He didn't rip anybody's bustier off, fondle his willie, wipe his ass with anybody's flag -- but he pulled off a blatantly subversive prank: "I shagged her rotten, innit, and she loved every glorious second of it, beep-beep-yeah..." But because the lyric hides behind a gossamer-thin veil of jokeyness, and because Paulie is such a crowd-pleasing, top-hat-and-cane showbiz hoofer, The Man, the National Super-Ego, Darth Vader, the Force of Darkness, smiled approvingly and nodded along -- an excellent choice, Mr. Tagliabue, an excellent choice...

And Macca followed it with "Get Back," which had me half-cringing -- a surrealist word-association potpourri that name-checks transvestism, reefer, incest... Fabulous family fare, Mr. Powell! I'll wait to hear from you in the morning!

Not a peep. Nothing. Ka-PWINNNG, right over everybody's heads and off into the Land Where Naughty Jokes Go to Die.

But the finale, "Hey Jude," was the most brilliantly transgressive choice of all. This song is the most point-blank decent, humane, kind, downright dare I say Christian thing I know of: Hey, look, you're in pain, I'm in pain, but I love you and trust you, and I hope you feel the same, and maybe if we were all nice to each other for a change we'd all be a little bit happier.... This in the midst of our annual national bread-and-circuses spectacle, where steroid- and ampetamine-crazed behemoths grunt silverback territorial threats at each other under the jet flybys and the steelbellied Barbie-doll cheerleaders wiggle their booties in martial rhythm and idiot color commentators yacket on about achieving Deep Penetration into the enemy's Red Zone...

The late Ian MacDonald, in his brilliant book, Revolution in the Head, presents us with a chart, many pages long, that places all the Beatles' recordings in their historical and cultural contexts. From this list we know, for example, that on March 2, 1963, when The Fabs' "Please Please Me" hit Number One on the British charts, their chief competition was Cliff Richard & the Shadows' Summer Holiday, Elvis Presley's Girls! Girls! Girls!, and the Four Seasons' Walk Like a Man. Not very prepossessing stuff, you'll agree.

Try to imagine, if you can, how glowing and incandescent and utterly mindblowingly shocking a song like "Please Please Me" was to some poor bastard soaked in all that 1963 dreck. "Last night I said..." where the harmonies part, one voice descending a ladder while the other holds its note, a straight cop from the Everly Brothers' "Cathy's Clown" from three years before, but yanked forward into Telstar modernity by the sheer, sexy, joyful drive of it, just two-guitars-bass-drums but sounding like a perfect gyroscope-balanced rocketship, every note signifying, and not a single note too many. And that incredible hook, the octave leap on "please please me woah yeah," a ballsy thing to write for yourself to sing onstage night after night, the work of a supremely self-confident songwriter. This was totally, unprecedentedly, thoroughly, life-affirmingly new.

And whaddya know... That chorus: Hey! It's a sex joke! Aaaaaall the way from stuffy old black-and-white, Profumo-scandal, Kim-Philby, missile-crisis, ring-a-ding-ding, loneliness-of-the-long-distance-runner 1963... A sneaky plea for a BJ! Let's both be naked by the end of this song!

I long to feel that shock again, and I begin to suspect I never will. Grumpy old Stephen Maturin often cites the Spanish proverb que no hayan novedades -- "may no new thing arise," and I'm afraid I know just what he means. The new that was new then is not now new.

This is why I become so defensive about old Sir Paul. In far, far too many ways today, we seem to be living through Yeats' Second Coming, where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. MacDonald (who, it pains me deeply to say, took his own life not long ago) wrote in his introduction:

The true revolution of the Sixties -- more powerful and decisive for Western society than any of its external byproducts -- was an inner one of feeling and assumption: a revolution in the head. Few were unaffected by this and, as a result of it, the world changed more thoroughly than it ever could have done under merely political direction. It was a revolution of and in the common man; a revolution (as Aaron Copeland, author of the eponymous fanfare, observed) whose manifesto -- its vices as much as its virtues, its losses as well as its gains, its confusions together with its lucidities -- is readable nowhere more lucidly than in The Beatles' records.

So hear this, you of the passionate intensity, you who would break the back of of my humanism, you who would force me to inhabit your horrid new empire that mocks me for my age and for my convictions: I know what you're up to.

I read the news today, oh boy....

How Silly of Us

OK look. We're very sorry that we ever had a Sixties, ok?

We're really sorry that we ever thought that sex shouldn't be freighted with guilt, that women should be allowed to choose when they have babies, that racism and poverty are worth trying to eradicate, that organized religion is fraught with horrid, repressive ugliness, that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be feeding our young to a war machine that makes us universally loathed the world over.

We're really sorry that we ever thought any of these things. We're sorry it ever happened, we won't ever do it again. Boy, that was sure naive of us! What were we thinking!

I guess we just never thought we'd have to live with 35 years of backlash...

Correction

Yesterday's blog entry, "They're Not Laughing at You, They're Laughing with You," contained an error. The name "Stephen Colbert" was accidentally substituted for that of Ted Hitler.

The editorial staff of "By Neddie Jingo" regrets the error.

But WTF is up with Ted Hitler's ears?

How Weird Can You Take It, Brother, Before Your Love Will Crack?

Jeff Wells, over at Rigorous Intuition, has lately been exploring some of the more angular corridors of power. Remember some months ago when Rev. Sun "Myuck" Moon had himself crowned Emperor of All He Surveyed in the Dirksen Building with the apparent endorsement of a whole bunch of Congresscritters who shouldn't have been within 150,000 miles of such a farce?

Well, start here...

Then go here...

And finally, here.

Don't ever say your Uncle Neddie doesn't turn you on to the Good Stuff...