Sealion II

So, it turns out it is not the easiest of all the things in the world to get the pictures to appear on the blogs. Obviously it is possible (see previous) but it involves a lot of re-sizing pictures and saving them in different formats. Very annoying.

So we may be sticking with text only for a while, until/unless I am seized by a fit of energy for Photoshop or the public demands it.

So, it's on you, public.

Yesterday I bought my first Tom Waits album. Tom Waits takes a little getting used to, but some of these songs are really beautiful ("Come On Up To The House" and "Hold On" in particular.)

"Come On Up To The House" has a really weird music video, btw. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GugzLSbOQE

I'm not totally sure it's the real Tom Waits-commissioned music video, but I think it is.

Monday we were in Edinburgh, after a long and really fairly hideous train ride. I don't have any pictures of the train ride, and it's just as well, because, well, fairly hideous. Only Axl was wise enough to splash out the extra $50 or so to get a sleeper car; the rest of us were too cheap. Plus, the HLP said "Sure you can sleep in the seats! I did it all the time when I was last here!"

Well, maybe they changed the seats. Or maybe it was that they didn't TURN OFF THE HIDEOUS YELLOW-ORANGE OVERHEAD LIGHTS. (Why not do this? Why not? Of all the many things I saw in the British Isles, this might have been the strangest.) Or maybe it was the fact that first the car temperature was arctic, and then it was sweltering, and it never seemed to find a happy medium. I went out at one point into the diner car, which is supposed to be for first-class passengers, I suppose, and was much cooler than where we were sitting (or sprawling, or lying, or hunching up in the fetal position, depending on what seemed like it might provide a little comfort at the moment). The attendant was asleep, so I hung out there for a little while.

On returning to the seat car I discovered it was still too hot to sleep, so I tried to go back to the diner care, only to be rebuffed by the attendant! "First class passengers only," he said, and would not be moved, despite the fact that it was THREE IN THE MORNING, and the car was empty. Surely class no longer exists at three in the morning? I was tempted to comment on the class sensitivity of English culture, but the guy was Pakistani (at least, he was from the Indian subcontinent and spoke with an accent--I guess he could've been Indian) and I figured, he probably gets way too much class warfare in his daily life, why make it worse? So I retreated into the double-boiler--I mean,the seat car--and made the best of it. Between the OPC, the HLP, and the ME we got about eight hours of sleep that night.

Long story short: it was a miserable experience.

...What? Edinburgh? Yeah, we got there in the end. I'll tell you about it in the next post.

Our first day in London! It was a very pleasant, sunny day, and we went out in search of Adventure. And this is what we found:

First, that the London Underground is a wonderful thing. Second, that it is horribly expensive. But hey, it was a vacation! Here we are. Yes, I am "reading" Orwell (the book's upside down...) and giving the peace sign. No, this is not intended to have symbolic meaning, although it might have symbolic meaning anyway.



We found some gentlemen in red military-esque gear. I don't know why they were dressed that way--if it was some special anniversary or what-have-you. Striking, though, isn't it?



We went to the National Gallery, which fronts on Trafalgar Square. Here's a picture of Lord Nelson from the back (he has his back to the Gallery; I don't remember what he's facing, although it appears to be Parliament. Quite rightly, he is reluctant to turn his back on a large group of elected officials.).

we will make those baby steps backwards, such that when you enter at the top of the page you will have to the bottom and scroll upward to encounter events in their correct chronological order. How very avant-garde. Like "Memento", but without tattoos.



That's me, nom de net sealionii (of course). That other guy we'll call the HLP, for reasons that are maybe really not all that funny when you consider that all of this begins in San Francisco.



This is Axl Wade and Our Photographic Correspondent (OPC for short). She's the one who actually took the pictures, and she's the HLP's little sister.

OK, so that's us. Now, where are we?

So, over the Christmas vacation I obtained a plethora of pictures from that long-ago trip to Europe which you may or may not remember at this point. So many that I am rather spoilt for choice, and have not yet written about the trip. I do not have the blogging stamina to put up all the pertinent information in a single go, so let's get started with the cast of characters, with "noms de net" to preserve privacy and reputations, insofar as is consistent with the pictures (ahem).

O.K., here goes:

Or maybe it has misplaced us.

Tonight I went to a lecture on dark matter and dark energy, which are, apparently, the major constituents of the Universe. Their interaction with our kind of matter is apparently purely gravitational; since they don't interact with the strong force, weak force, or electromagnetic force, we can't see them--hence, they are dark.

(Note that this means that we (human beings) are not dark matter--we aren't tremendous fonts of energy, but we do a) interact with other "light" (i.e., visible) matter and b) emit electromagnetic radition. So we are starstuff in more ways than one.)

Anyway. My fellow dark-matter investigator and I agreed that the more we heard about it the less easy it was to believe in (which is not to say the evidence was faulty, or even unconvincing; just that everything we learned made it less and less intuitive. The search for dark matter: it's like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there!)

And the presenter left unanswered our burning question: How does this affect our star charts? Surely astrology must have taken note of the influence of dark matter on our lives by now! (Perhaps this explains why I totally fail to match my rising sign in "face that I present to the world" personality?)

So there I was, preparing to sleep the sleep of the justified, when the horrible alarm went off! "RRRR! RRRR! RRRR! Emergency, emergency. An emergency has been reported on an adjacent floor of this building. Please leave the building immediately using the nearest fire exit. Do not use elevators. Repeat, do not use elevators."

So said the mechanical voice over and over as we plopped down the six flights of stairs in obedience to its command. The fire truck has come; I write this across the street in my lab, as I wait for the all-clear so I can return to my bed and sweet dreams.

They may want to stop the ones who want a rock to wind their string around; but everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around. So there.

And, apparently, what the people want is More Kenneth Branagh!

Unfortunately, well, there's a limited supply. So I've had to make do with...

SPONGMONKEYS!

Say hi to everyone, Ken.

The great thing about "The Best of ELO" is that it is $9.99 for 29 songs on iTunes. How can you not love that? Even if only one-third of the album was listenable you would get a good return on the money.

The Electric Light Orchestra is one of those bands that rock critics love to hate. This is because, well, it's an orchestra. That plays rock and roll. They do a cover of "Roll Over Beethoven" that starts with Beethoven's 5th. That's just the kind of band they are.

This is also the kind of thing that really gets the average rock critic's goat. But this is a post about The Best of ELO, not Rock Criticism: Its Many Failures of Imagination, so let's give that pass at present.

There are a whole lot of really entertaining songs on this album, along with quite a fair number where, well, the weaknesses of ELO's premise are abundantly evident (please, not the orchestral disco!). There's lots and lots of synthesizer, and lots of distorted vocals, and the titular orchestra, and generally lots of evidence that Jeff Lynne (founder and lead vocalist) spent a lot of time in production. In addition to the radio stalwarts ("Do Ya", "Telephone Line", "Don't Bring Me Down" et al.) there are a number of other really fun songs: "Four Little Diamonds", "Calling America" and "So Serious" are getting consistent iPod play over in this neck of the woods.

To sum up:
Musical Quality: 7.5 out of 10.
Weirdness: 7 out of 10 (we're running strong on the weird albums here. This goes up and down a lot--some of these songs are pretty standard 70s synth-rock, and then you get the opera singer coming in on "Rockaria" and watch that needle spike, ladies and gentlemen!)
Obscurity: 4 out of 10. This has all the radio favorites, so a classic-rock radio listener will see 8-10 songs here that are familiar.

Buy/Sell/Hold: Buy! If you like ELO on the radio, anyway. Hey, as it said at the top, $10 for 29 songs!

It would get:

Musical Quality: 9 out of 10.
Weirdness: 8 out of 10. (Britney Spears and medieval madrigal and rounds on the same album.)
Obscurity: 7 out of 10.

Recommendation: Buy, Buy, Buy!

By Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band.

"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?"

How you react to that statement is probably a good indication of how you will react to the album Trout Mask Replica.

This is easily the weirdest music I have ever bought and possibly the weirdest music (when it is music) I've ever listened to. Suppose you had a bunch of musically talented friends with a recording studio in their basement, and a random assortment of instruments, and a few songs they were working on for their album. Late one evening everyone gets mentally altered and goes down to the basement and does stuff for a couple of hours with the recording tape running, and when your friend who owns the studio finds it he does a little bit of post-production, and, well, there you go.

This is actually one of the most famous of experimental rock music albums--along with Weasels Ripped My Flesh! and some of Frank Zappa's other stuff.

How does it score (scales 0-10, mostly)?

Musical Quality: Incomplete. A lot of this is, er, not really "songs". Some of it isn't music (I don't think).

Weirdness: 15. The gold standard for Weirdness. I can't even measure anything else on the Weirdness scale if I put Trout Mask Replica at 10.

Obscurity: 8. It's pretty out there.

Recommendation (Buy, Sell, Hold): Hold. I'm not sorry I bought it, but, well, it didn't inspire me to run out and get all the other Beefhearts.

Some of my nearest and dearest are, have been, or will be lawyers. I put it to you: does this essay speak truth?

Via the Volokhs.

For what it's worth, I think a very similar essay could be written about being a doctor. Come to that, a fairly similar essay could be written about being a research scientist.

Moral of the story: there ain't no free lunch, kids.

Too bad. I was getting hungry.

There is an old saw that one's first million words of writing will be junk. (There's a blog name for the concept, of course. There is probably a blog named for everything under the sun, at this point, plus a few things that aren't (viz. the indessed clan: Roscivs, Lady J Gray, and Lieutenant Renji).

Today I am wondering how many words I have written. I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than a million by now, counting the school essays, applications, paper drafts, and online maunderings of various sorts. Maybe I'm into paydirt already?

I don't think most blog posts count, though, or message board posts, or most e-mail. If you don't polish, it's just so much flimmery. Mere communication cuts not the mustard in the matter of improving one's writing. (Not that there's anything wrong with merely communicating!)

I once read part of a truly harrible book that someone had in their house; it was obviously the product of a vanity press, and it made me think of all the people who say "I think I have a book in me." And maybe they do, but that doesn't mean they should necessarily let it out! People are deceived by the fact that the "mere communication" level of writing is easy to reach; we teach first graders to do it all the time. Having something worth reading--that's a lot harder. Come to that, it might even be hard enough to justify Yeat's comparison to manual labor.

No wonder the scriptwriters are striking. Writing is hard work. Not as hard as W.B. Yeats might have you believe, although it's probably harder to do well than it is to wash floors. But still hard.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that so many bloggers rely on pictures?

Allen Iverson is no ordinary man.

The Fifth of November!
Gunpowder, treason and plot!
I see no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot!

***

Nowadays, of course, it is just a chance to shoot off fireworks. Rarely does one get to make an ironic political statement with fireworks, but Guy Fawkes' Day is an excellent chance. If we celebrated the defense of Fort McHenry, I suppose September 13th would be another one.

What is now Prov'd, was once only Imagined.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

when our thoughts turn to the patron of Halloween...David Bowie.

You may be asking yourself, "David Bowie the patron of Halloween? Is this possible? How did this happen?"

Well, it was partly a process of elimination. He did try the whole Christmas thing, but it wasn't a good fit. And, well, the 4th of July wasn't quite his thing either. (WARNING: Bad language and blasphemious attitude, also terribly catchy. The song title says it all, though; you don't actually have to listen to it if you'd rather not.)

Halloween, though...that's a holiday Bowie can get into. He was a great Goblin King, to be sure.

Of course, if we had a major holiday for the moon landing, he could do that too.

I am a big fan of sleep. Sleep is good for you, especially if you are a teenager. Why do we have high-schoolers go to school before elementary school kids, and not after? This makes no sense, physiologically speaking.

I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but it bears repeating: adults sleep roughly two hours a day less than they did one hundred years ago (nine hours vs. seven). That's absolutely crazy, and I think it's a major contributing factor to the general increase in mental illness, especially unipolar depression, we're seeing throughout the world. Cheap electric light is wonderful stuff, but it may have hidden costs...