Mini-Snoopy Batplane!

My 8-year-old is singing to himself a song he made up about a "mini-Snoopy Batplane" while flying a toy plane around. That's not the odd part.

The odd part is that he's singing it in the persona of his new toothbrush, and interrupting himself in the voice of the plastic package the toothpaste came in, which wants him to stop singing, and is getting increasingly upset that he won't.

#416: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive" (1978)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYkACVDFmeg

I don't entirely get disco, it seems. It's certainly not that I'm against it: there will be four disco songs on the countdown. That said, all of them were massive hits and obvious choices. (I also considered "In the Navy", although it wouldn't have been the radio version: it would have been the one from the Muppet Show sung on a coastal village raid by Viking pigs.) Chuck Eddy has argued that disco succeeded in achieving progressive rock's goals -- of bringing together unlike forms of music from across the world -- far beyond prog's own powers, and I find it plausible that he might be right. You'd have to link me favorite examples in the Comments, though, because most of the disco songs I've heard *other* than those mega-hits strike me as bland.

"I Will Survive", though, works, and it's definitely eclectic.

#417: the Bobs, "Art for Art's Sake" (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4HRbkTx8n4

"Art for Art's Sake", by the Bobs, is not the only a-cappella song that will appear in my favorite songs countdown -- if I'm not overlooking any, there'll be five all told, plus most of a sixth -- but it's the one where I think the fact that no one's playing any instruments is most remarkable. It's why I've linked a live performance by the quartet: I consider it well worth watching. Because it's a New Wave pop song: the first thing we hear is the bassline (sung by the guy with the glasses), and later the chorus is helped into immortality by the glossy synthesizer hook (or that's what Foreigner or Night Ranger or Loverboy would've made it, and you can hear it that way in your head with no effort, although in fact it's sung by the same guy). The guitar solos are sung by the guy with the mustache; they're rather hair-metaly, but brief, and decidedly more fun for their unusual format.

Just so-so story

I've helped my 10-year-old brainstorm, as an English assignment, an original "just-so story" myth explaining the origin of an Earth custom; he chose, ambitiously, the origin of war. What we've come up with is that village disputes used to be settled by dancing competitions judged by the gods.

With the competition that became the first war, one problem was that the god in charge of deciding the dispute was widely rumored to be in love with a girl from one of the villages (and indeed, ruled her village the victor). But the other catalyst was that the dispute, taking place at a giant dinner party, was over proper table manners and utensil usage. The losing side, who felt that they had in fact danced better, were all "Never mind, the correct way to use sharp knives is like THIS *stab stab*". The old system never aroused enough trust again.

#418: Dowling Poole, "Empires, Buildings, and Acquisitions" (2014)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBbNEFOSpY

In one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, "the Empty Child/ the Doctor Dances" (set in WWII Blitz-era England), Christopher Eccleston's Doctor realizes that a teenage girl he's interacted with has been using the air-raid sirens as a chance to lead a group of younger homeless children into suddenly-abandoned houses to eat the food off the table of well-off Britishers while the residents are hiding from the bombs. She asks if he plans to stop her; he replies "It's brilliant! I'm not sure if it's Marxism in action or a West End musical."

Ugh jobs at good wages

Whatever we think of the Trump Administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, it bothers me to see immigrants on farms praised for doing "work Americans won't do". That phrase is an evasive way of saying "Work that plenty of Americans will do, quite eagerly, *if* you pay enough".

Is the farm work that illegal immigrants do unpleasant, exhausting, health-damaging, and low-status? Absolutely -- even Stephen Colbert has tried it and vouched in person. I bet it's even worse than working at an Amazon.com warehouse (although worse in degree, not kind). All of those are great reasons not to take work.

On the other hand,

#419: Gentleman Auction House, "Book of Matches" (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLB0JQThdaE

I'm guessing you haven't heard this one: click the link, and enjoy a bouncy indie-pop song, firm thumping beats around pockets of air over which Eric Enger's high, conversational singing voice (and Kiley Kozel's soft girlish harmonies) can enunciate. The music builds nicely into (and out of) jubilantly defiant choruses, filled in by organ notes, fiery but precise guitar, and massed singing.

Intentionally or not, the song comes across as a reply to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire".

#420: Tom Petty, "Don't Come Around Here No More" (1985)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8

I call my list "favorite songs", but technically it's "favorite *recordings* of songs", and those can be quite different. To make the case for Tom Petty as one of our great mainstream rock songwriters, I have a decent array of options. Few hit songs have ever sketched a character as efficiently and wittily as "She's a good girl: loves her mama, loves Jesus and America too. She's a good girl, crazy about Elvis; loves horses, and her boyfriend too". "Into the Great Wide Open" needs just two verses of AAABCCCD rhyme to tell an entire VH-1 Behind the Music biography ("His leather jacket had chains that would jingle/ They both met movie stars, partied and mingled/ Their A+R man said 'I don't hear a single'/ Their future was wide open"). "She was an American girl/ raised on promises" summarizes a person and a country in eight words.

Potemkin charm and wit: on Balsamic Dreams by Joe Queenan

(Originally written/ posted 2004. One of my favorite of my old reviews, of a book I bottom-lined as "Funny, rude, sometimes right, sometimes insightful ... (T)he first 50 pages are both interesting and a blast. Sadly, it's 200 pages long." The review starts with an extract from Queenan's introduction.)

**********
”Late in the summer of the Year of Our Lord 2000, I began to suffer from a nagging cough... [it] had me thinking in terms of lung cancer. Confronted by my own mortality, I began to lament all the things I had not yet accomplished with my life.

#421: Janet Jackson, "Velvet Rope" (1997)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeO4Da3J-sM

Neither the album Velvet Rope nor the title song were anything I expected, in 1997, to like. I've mentioned that my songs countdown is going to under-represent black artists; it's nothing to do with malice, and quite a lot to do with the simple fact that at least in the United States, white and black listeners are exposed to different musical traditions (on average, obviously with many exceptions, but my musical listening growing up at home was *entirely* white). One broad difference, as I perceive it, is a traditional white-music emphasis on composed melodies, versus a traditional black-music emphasis on dance rhythms, bass, and melismatic vocal improvisation. I had no use for Janet's Rhythm Nation 1814, nor do I now, and I wouldn't have expected to from the title (although the "1814" part sounds intriguingly specific; I've never figured out its referent, sadly, and the socially conscious lyrics throughout seem vague and limp to me).

Velvet Rope on the other hand puts more emphasis on tunes. Every song has a good beat,

ObamaCare, RepubliCare

A quick note on language and U.S. health care: "TrumpCare" is a TERRIBLE name for the Republican Party's health care "plan" (which at best will deprive 15-20 million Americans of functional health care, or even 26 million, and at worst end the individual health insurance market altogether). Please don't use it. The shorthand has to be "RepubliCare".

Donald Trump doesn't know or care about health care legislation -- RepubliCare is a creation of the Republican Party. Which doesn't care about it either, except the fact that it'll repeal the tax increases on the rich that Obama's Affordable Care Act put in place. Trump is a figurehead, and one who might be gone in a couple years anyway. The party that made him powerful is the toxicity's source, and it's high time they started being called on it.

**********
When I posted the above on Facebook, I got a lot of support, but some inclination to offer alternative names. Unfortunately, as lovely as individual opinions are in almost any context, politics rewards unified messages, and all the alternatives, while better than "TrumpCare", are worse than "RepubliCare":

#422: Mary Timony, "Blood Tree" (2002)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0EaJTYGjA

Mary Timony's first prominent-ish band Helium were, like the Pixies, a Boston-area band who got played on 120 Minutes -- they also got her lusted after by Beavis and Butthead. They were largely immune to Pixies lessons about dynamics. They began as a multi-guitar noise-and-drone band (even Timony's singing had a flattened, droning way to them and was kept back in the mix), the American version of bands like Slowdive/ Swervedriver/ Ride/ My Bloody Valentine who won't be showing up on this countdown because too many thick guitar sounds hurt my ears.

But when I moved to Boston, Helium suddenly released

Dons, drums, and details

Don Felder, former Eagles guitarist, says that while recording 'the Long Run', Don Henley spent four weeks of studio time personally reviewing and personally signing off on every single drum beat on the record, on every song.

All I can think is: That's a lot of supervision to put into every detail of a record without noticing "oops, crap, it's full of Eagles songs".

Cast off like the dorky sweater her mother made her wear: on the Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris

(Originally written summer 2006 for a now-defunct website. I'd've written it a bit differently now, as a divorced father of two sons. But I think it holds up well, and my parenting experience strengthens, not weakens, my belief in the book's premises.)

" 3. The advantage of twins is…

a. Having a spare in case one blows out.

b. Having both a control and experimental group to test out your theories on nature versus nurturing, love versus neglect and human parents versus wolf pack.

c. Fooling your neighbors into thinking you’ve mastered the science of teleporting children across the room.”


- from ‘Parental Standardized Aptitude Test’, by Francesco Marciuliano

**********
Judith Rich Harris’s the Nurture Assumption – a book about why people end up with the personalities they end up with – may well be, in my opinion, the single most brilliant work of scientific argument I’ve ever read. I mean brilliant in the sense of “original”, of “superbly constructed”, of “fun to read”, and, especially, of “persuasive”.

#423: Pixies, "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHC9HE7vazI

My countdown's introductory post specifies "Don't take the rankings seriously" and "I'll arrange the list for nice song-to-song segues", and starts a longer thought by saying "The list will progress slowly from Songs I Love". I bring this up because, while many of the songs I nominate will be unused to widespread honors, sometimes I'll do something like place a Pixies song at #423. I want to make sure the take-away, as readers, is "I love this song" (true!) and not "I'm dissing one of the most important and admired bands in Alternative Rock by putting 422 other songs by other acts ahead of them". Everything on my countdown, I list out of fondness, full stop.

If they'd made their first record in 1979 instead of 1987, the Pixies would likely have been

#424: Los Campesinos!, "For Flotsam" (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7_u0DbW1Dw

As segues go, it's hard to resist going from 1980 and "Blame it all on VTR" to a 2013 song whose first verse begins "You say you are an old cassette that has gone and split its spool".

These aren't the opening words of Los Campesinos!'s "For Flotsam", quite. It starts just with softly ringing synthesizer and Gareth Campesinos’s twee-yet-vigorous alto singing what turns out to be its chorus: “Knees knocking and blood flowing, so/ I want you to know that I want to”. So it's not an *exact* segue: Gareth is romanticizing a female friend, not a pre-sentient machine. That's why Trevor Horn gets cool oversized sunglasses while Gareth gets stuck with the percussive legs.

Valid exorcist math

I doubted my 10-year-old when he claimed he could turn his head 360 degrees, but it turns out he can! Holding his neck still, he moved his body around in a tight circle.

Impressed, I dared him to turn his head 360 degrees while holding the rest of his body still. "I can", I promised. He gave up and asked me to demonstrate. I turned my head sharply to the right, forward again, sharply to the left, and forward. 90 x 4 = 360.

Hey, when a store promises to be open 24 hours, I'm not gonna kvetch if I get there and it's closed - unless they promised "in a row"....

#425: Buggles, "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ

MTV, obviously, set the precedent here back in August 1981: if you're going to present a bunch of unrelated songs to an invisible public with no clear path to accomplishing anything, start with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. It's structured superbly for an introductory song: first the gleaming, reverberating washes of synthesizer. Then the soft but sprightly electric piano and the sad vocals, distorted over cheap transmission; the cooing female "Oh, uh oh" hook; the thumping quarter-note drum that starts 24 seconds in, and the first quick tease of that switched-on-Bach style of sprightly keyboard two seconds later.

My 425 favorite songs: introduction and index

In order to push myself to write small, easily-digested blog entries -- and to serve the well-documented popularity of lists -- I hereby announce my blog's first long-running project: the countdown of my 425 favorite songs, limited to one per artist. While my blog will continue to feature other things, I will also, every day or two, post a YouTube-linked song that I love, and a couple of paragraphs about the song and artist.

This should be simple enough to not psych me out. Plus, if a few of you make a habit of listening to the songs and sending me thoughts about them, it should also be a lot of fun.

A few quick Frequently Imagined Questions with Answers:

Ad hominem

"Untimely Meditations" has its first troll! I'm excited. My troll does not seem to know, among many other things, what "ad hominem" means, although he uses the phrase a lot. So for fun, here's a reminder to us all, in the context he chose.

"Ad hominem" would be "You can tell Steven Levitt is an asshole because he wears his shirt collars all folded up for a bow tie, but is too gutless to put the bow tie on". "Ad hominem" would be "Freakonomics Boy did his academic training in Chicago. Obviously he shoots people, so of course his ideas about the crime rate are crap". "Ad hominem" would be "His essay on prostitution makes it sound like a great career choice, so I won't believe he means anything he says until he sucks cock for a living himself".

My argument was "Levitt has repeatedly published unreliable and misleading social science, so his social science work should be distrusted". That's called "inductive reasoning". It's nowhere near as fun to write, so it better have some advantage.

One curiosity. My troll is opposed to ad hominem attacks, so the following must not be one: "Impugning a liberal, to you, is far worse than rape or murder". Noted!

Keeping warped minutes: on Popular Crime by Bill James

While this review will be unwieldy — I'm not sure I've ever reviewed something about which I had so many conflicted things to say — and parts of it will be negative, my basic attitude towards Bill James’s 2011 book Popular Crime is enthusiasm. It is fascinating, insightful, and fun. I recommend it highly.

It is not an easy book to summarize, and later I will take my time helping you through its odd structure. But to start with samples of its topics, my favorite sections include the ones where Bill James, who made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential Thinkers in 2006, argues

* that Lizzy Borden was innocent (she never took an ax and gave her father forty whacks);
* that John F. Kennedy was accidentally killed by a Secret Service agent who was flustered by Oswald’s shots;
* that Sam Sheppard, the kindly doctor-on-the-run who inspired the TV series the Fugitive, in fact hired and collaborated with the killer of his wife;
* and that JonBenet Ramsey’s parents were definitely innocent of her killing, and likely framed by an intruder deliberately trying to ruin the dad’s life.

That would seem an immodest project already, perhaps. More ambitiously, and to varying degrees of success, James

Turing the White House

I'm seeing tweets of people doubting -- and this really shows you how the dishonest left in this country treats a sitting president, a popular president -- doubting if I could pass a Turing Test. Now maybe you've heard about the, look, the mainstream liberal media reports the Turing Test all wrong, for one thing. Alan Turing, brilliant man, a heroic veteran, one of the first computer scientists; I had an uncle who was a computer scientist, very smart, one of the smartest, met Turing, had deals with Turing, I have nothing but good things to say about him, but the Turing Test was about men and women. That's what they don't tell you.

Small is de-uglified: on how to dramatically improve the U.S. prison system

From pages 425 to 435 of Bill James’s sprawling, unpredictable (but brilliant) book Popular Crime, James outlines a dramatic reform of the prison system that is, in my opinion, exactly correct.

It would be a huge step forward: in terms of crime reduction, fear-of-crime reduction (not at all the same thing), in-prison behavior, and the integration of former criminals into society. I say that as a guy who’s come up with dramatic prison-reform schemes of my own, purely as a hobby, btw (my profession is teaching): his scheme is better than mine ever were. Because my forthcoming review is struggling not to be as sprawling and unwieldy as the original book, I’ve decided to write up his proposal here.

In very short form: